Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xvii, 271 p.; also includes graphics (some col.). Includes bibliographical references (p. 262-271). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

Thesis (M.Ed. (Education)) - Rhodes University, 2007. / In partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree Master in Education (GETP)

Thesis (M.Ed. (Education)) - Rhodes University, 2007. / In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters in Education (Education Leadership & Management)

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to investigate the impact of a Title I Comprehensive Plan on factors that affect the learning and the success of a Title I school, such as administrative support, student discipline, parental engagement, professional development, class size, and attendance. Annual District Parent and Teacher Surveys, INow attendance reports, INOW discipline reports, ACT Aspire Testing data, and Ident-A-Kit school signature documents were analyzed and observations were made in order to acquire information concerning the success of the Title One Comprehensive Plan in a Title I school. This type of research involves emerging questions and procedures, data analysis inductively building from particulars to general themes, and the researcher interpreting the data (Creswell, 2008). The results of this study aims to influence and assist school leaders and teachers’ efforts to promote students’ academic success within Title I environments. The findings from this research will provide teachers, students and educational leaders with an opportunity for understanding how students in Title I identified school succeed. One elementary school in the eastern region of the United States was used in the study. This school is pre-kindergarten through fifth school that has been a Title I for several years. The school serves over 750 students. The time frame for this research project was two months. The findings of this study add supporting evidence to the influence of the independent variables. The results of this study show that the researcher identified four dominant themes that appeared during the study. Professional development, student attendance, class size, and high expectation on student achievement were the common themes that support the importance of the independent variables on factors that have an impact on the success of the Title I Comprehensive Plan on a Title I school.

The focus of this research is the relationship between the community and the High School in rural areas. The strenuous relationship is addressed as a contributory factor towards learners’ poor performance at school. Rural areas constitute of several communities, which interacts with one another within a larger community. Particular attention is given to how several communities interact with the school in rural areas. It is the opinion of the researcher that every effort should be concentrated in bringing together all these communities and the school, to put into practice the concept of “tirisano”. The method used in this research is two-fold: Firstly it contains a literature study on the relationship between the community and the school. The researcher used this information to support his investigation and to make results based on factual information. Secondly, it contains information derived from the interviews. With the information derived from the interviews, the researcher was able to derive the respondents’ opinions on why the relationship is strenuous. The study recommends that learners should try their level best to improve this performance and to put the image of the school to where it belongs. Teachers should do the best job of teaching as possible and should involve other stakeholders like the church, business sector, political sector and the community at large. The study further recommends that the concept of “tirisano” and “ubuntu” should be seen being effectively implemented by the community and the school in rural areas. / Dr. M.C. Van Loggerenberg

M.Ed. / Despite the proven benefits of activity, people today are living sedentary lifestyles, resulting in a decline in the general health of the population. At the World Summit on Physical Education held in 1999 in Berlin, international delegates presented research evidence on the benefits of Physical Education (PE) and its important role in developing healthy, active children. However, the assumption that the ineffective implementation of PE in many of the schools in the past compromised the value of the subject and its status was lost. PE was a subject in need of review. Change was essential in order to ensure that the holistic benefits of PE were realised and that the knowledge, skills and values necessary to encourage lifetime physical activity participation were developed. In the new democratic South Africa, the need to establish curriculum principles founded on the fundamental values of the Constitution was essential for the growth of individuals, communities and the country as a whole. Although these principles are considered across the curriculum, the development and implementation of a new Learning Area (LA) known as Life Orientation ensured these principles were also entrenched in a specific programme. Of particular interest was the positioning of the PE outcome in the Further Education and Training (FET) phase. As a PE specialist who believes in the value and worth of PE, especially in its new guise within Life Orientation, the researcher noted, with concern, the apparent lack of commitment in many schools to uplift the state and status of this vitally important outcome within Life Orientation. Although the new curriculum was only implemented in Grade 10 in 2006, Grade 11 in 2007 and came into effect in Grade 12 in 2008, there were already noticeable gaps developing between policy and practice in some of the schools in South Africa. This study gave the researcher the opportunity to investigate the implementation of the PE outcome in the FET phase in rural schools in Mpumalanga Province where the gap between policy and practice had already been expressed.There were many implementation problems identified by the findings. The lack of the teachers’ relevant knowledge, skills and experience, the poor support received from the district and the schools, insufficient teaching and learning material, the almost non-existent facilities and equipment available and the large class sizes all contributed to implementation difficulties. A comprehensive picture of the many inter-dependent aspects affecting the implementation of PE programmes was acquired. The research conducted gave the researcher the framework to establish both the current level of implementation and the ideal level of implementation to which the schools could aspire.

Magister Educationis - MEd / The primary purpose of this study was to understand how certain factors could contribute to the low achievement levels of Grade 12 learners from two selected rural schools. For the purpose of this research these two schools were referred to as schools A and B. The academic performance of Grade 12 learners from schools A and B has been very low since 2008-2010. On average, these two senior secondary schools produced less than 5% of their learners who qualified for entrance to the University of Namibia (Ministry of Education, 2003-2010).

This study explores secondary school children’s constructions of care and support provided for ‘vulnerable’ schoolchildren in the age of HIV and AIDS. The study attempts to respond to the following two research questions: What are secondary school children’s constructions of care and support in a rural school context in the age of HIV and AIDS? How can the use of participatory arts-based research enable agency in the lives of ‘vulnerable’ secondary school children in a rural school context in the age of HIV and AIDS? The provision of care and support for ‘vulnerable’ school children is of key concern in South African schools since the number of ‘vulnerable’ children is rising because of the increase in the prevalence of HIV and AIDS, which renders many school children ‘vulnerable’. Schools are mandated by departmental policy to provide care and support to ‘vulnerable’ school children, but they are challenged in their implementation of this policy, which leaves ‘vulnerable’ school children inadequately cared for and supported. The input from school children is often not drawn upon, and this hampers the effectiveness of the provision of care and support. This qualitative study is positioned within a critical paradigm, and employs a participatory arts-based research methodology in its intention to take an approach based on the notion of research as intervention. Twenty Grade 11 male and female school children aged 16 to 21, from two secondary schools in the rural Vulindlela district in KwaZulu-Natal, were purposively selected, using inclusion criteria. The Life Orientation teachers assisted in identifying participants from the school register of ‘vulnerable’ schoolchildren. This did not mean that they were living with HIV or AIDS, but that they were ‘vulnerable’, and at risk of dropping out of school. The study made use of a multimodal approach of data generation with the school children, in which several visual methods, such as drawing, photovoice, and collage, as well as reflective free writing, were used in a participatory way as modes of inquiry, representation, and dissemination. The ethics of research with ‘vulnerable’ school children made the dictum, “do the most good” through the research important, and hence the use of the strategy of research as intervention. The data analysis involved two levels – that of the school children’s own analysis of their visual artifacts, and my overarching thematic analysis, using Tesch’s (1990) open coding. Informed by the theoretical frameworks of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) bio-ecological systems theory and Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory, the findings show that care and support in schools is constructed as a reciprocal relationship, and they point to the importance of school children’s own agency in the provision of care and support. The findings show that school children construct themselves as both visible and invisible in relation to care and support in school, in that they receive care and support but are overlooked in terms of being able to offer input on how care and support should be provided. Furthermore, the findings indicate that school children perceive the school to be an environment that enables but also constrains the provision of care and support: the infrastructure, the safety and security, and the instructional spaces in the school do provide the basics for care and support, but the overt and covert discrimination by school children and teachers, the challenge of putting policies into practice, and the overall fragmented provision of care and support in the school are constraining. Another emerging finding from this study is that secondary school children construct themselves as being included in the strengthening of care and support in rural schools. The use of visual arts-based methods enabled the exploration of how ‘vulnerable’ school children construct care and support in a rural school; the findings also indicated how the use of visual arts-based research contributed to making a difference in the lives of ‘vulnerable’ school children: it was a joyful experience; it leveraged multiple literacies; it contributed to cooperation, collaboration, and collective construction of knowledge; and, in encouraging thought about the issue, it raised critical awareness of, and solutions to, providing care and support in the school. The findings also pointed out how the visual artifacts could be disseminated in the school, and how this could influence the well-being of the community. The findings have implications for how schools provide care and support for ‘vulnerable’ school children. The findings could be engaged with by schools and the Department of Basic Education as a tool to accomplish strengthening the provision of care and support in rural schools, so that care and support are socially and culturally embedded, and to inform policy making through an approach that can be described as being from the ground up.

This study examined the impact of principals' data-driven decision-making practices on student achievement using the theoretical frame of Dervin's sense-making theory. This study is a quantitative cross-sectional research design where principals' perceptions about data were quantitatively captured at a single point in time. The participants for this study were 253 rural school principals currently serving in schools across Texas, and included both males and females across all ethnic groups, including white, African American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and other. A developed survey instrument was administered to principals. The findings from the quantitative SEM analyses indicated that the Principal Uses Data to Improve Student Achievement latent variable (Factor 1) and the Principal and Staff Ability to Analyze Data to Improve Student Achievement latent variable (Factor 2) were significantly and positively associated with student achievement. Higher scores on these two latent variables were associated with better student achievement. There was no statistical association between the Principal Uses Data to Design Teacher Professional Development latent variable (Factor 3) and this target outcome. In total, the three latent variables accounted for 6% of the variance in student achievement (TAKS). When the campus level outcome was considered, no statistically significant associations between any of the latent variables and this outcome were evident. In total, the three latent variables accounted for less than 2% of the variance in campus level.

Leadership for learning has arisen as a robust framework for measuring principal leadership practices that impact student achievement by synthesizing fundamental theories of principal leadership, such as instructional leadership, transformational leadership, and shared instructional leadership. Research affirms the need for principals to prioritize leadership for learning practices based on the context. However, we know little about how context impacts which leadership for learning practices are prioritized by teachers and administrators in these different contexts of school level (elementary or secondary) and region (rural, small town, suburban, urban). The purpose of this dissertation study is to examine how differences in context affect specific leadership for learning practices. These differences will provide evidence for the need to revamp the principal evaluation systems that are currently in use and allow us to identify opportunities for preparation, support, and professional development for principals. I use the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) survey for this dissertation study as it combines recent research on principal leadership to measure specific leadership skills. Collected by the researchers of the CALL group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I use the 2016-2019 CALL dataset in the present study, which includes 281 schools with 536 administrators and 8,027 teachers. This dissertation study examines a) differences in teacher and administrator ratings within the CALL assessment, b) differences in secondary and elementary school level ratings within the CALL assessment, c) differences in administrator’s ratings by region within the CALL assessment. The results of this dissertation study show that a) administrator perceptions of the frequency of leadership for learning practices are always higher than teacher scores for any leadership for learning practice, b) elementary schools had fewer disagreements across the leadership for learning practices in comparison to secondary schools when comparing the perceptions of the frequency of practices in leadership for learning scores between teachers and administrators, and c) substantial differences occur in the perception of the frequency of leadership for learning practices between urban school administrators and administrators in other regional contexts (rural, small town, suburban), especially around issues of school climate, summative evaluation of teachers and students, and resourcing strategically.