Social support has been identified as an important component of planning for careers among high school students. Lent, Brown, and Hackett (2000) advocated for the importance of this support within Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT). These authors identified a need for further research with better measurement for examining contextual support and its connection to career decision-making. Ali et al. (2011) developed a set of measures to address this need for better measurement, but identified the need for more nuanced examination of specific types of contextual support. The current study was designed to assess the importance of nuanced measuring of different types of support in career-decision making. Specifically, two scales, School Personnel and Community, from the Contextual Support of Post Secondary Planning Scales (CSPSPS) are analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis to force the scales into the factor structures proposed by Ali et al. (2011). Additionally, exploratory factor analysis was used to further examine the school personnel scale. Finally, interventions to aid School Personnel and Community in ways to support students in career decision-making are considered.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Baylor University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-142).

In this dissertation, I analyze the effects of competition in education markets. In my first essay, I analyze the effects of different concentration measures on school personnel salaries. I find evidence that principals have more bargaining power over their salaries than teachers in Washington that through rent-sharing, principals start getting positive returns from increasing concentration at lower levels of concentration than that of teachers. Moreover, I present that the pattern of teacher salaries versus concentration in Washington is similar to that in Texas, but the inflection point in Washington is at substantially lower levels of concentration-a finding which can be attributed to Washington's being a union state versus Texas's being a right-to-work-state. In my second essay, I examine the effects of various measures of competition on school district cost inefficiency in a stochastic frontier framework. My results show that cost frontier is U-shaped in Texas with large positive returns to the scale over a relatively big range and mild diseconomies of scale over an extended range. In addition, I find that school district cost inefficiency increases significantly when market concentration increases. Furthermore, I present the competitive effect/scale effect trade-off through a couple of simulation exercises. The findings from both of my studies show that the effects of competition are barely sensitive to measuring the competition with different sets of relevant competitors. On the other hand, sensitivity of the effects of competition to using different definitions of the education markets is significant. Yet, the range of these estimated effects is relatively small, and the sign and the significance of the effect of competition generally do not change when a meaningful definition of education markets is employed to measure concentration. Furthermore, I present that the concentration measures employed in my essays are endogenous. I control for the endogeneity with several instrumental variables including degrees of lagged educational outputs in the neighboring schools, lagged education market characteristics, and counts of streams. My results imply that the hypothesized effects of competition may be underestimated due to the endogeneity. While the plausibility of competitive effect's being underestimated bolsters the importance of the competitive effects I find, it also strengthens my criticism of using uni-dimensional concentration indices as indicators of competition in the education markets.

Syftet med denna C-uppsats var att undersöka hur skolpersonalen upplever det stöd som finns tillgängligt för eleverna på skolan. Studien genomfördes på en skola i Västsverige där tillvägagångssättet i studien var intervjuer med sex personer ur skolpersonalen. Deltagarna i undersökningen var sex personer med olika arbetsuppgifter på skolan där professionerna: skolsköterska, skolkurator och lärare innefattades. Metoden som användes var kvalitativ metod. Det finns väldigt få forskningsrapporter som belyser frågeställningar om elevhälsans tillgänglighet sett ur ett personalrelaterat perspektiv inom den kvalitativa forskningsmetoden. Inom kvantitativ forskningsmetod finns det något fler tillgängliga forskningsrapporter men de är fortfarande relativt få. Denna undersökning resulterade i sex stycken olika teman som beskriver hur och i vilken utsträckning skolpersonalen upplever att de finns tillgängliga för eleverna. I denna uppsats används till största del beteckningen elevhälsa, vilket innefattar det arbete som skolpersonalen utför för att eleverna ska må bra, såväl fysiskt som psykiskt och enligt existerande lagar och regler. Uppsatsen avslutas med en diskussionsdel där väsentliga delar och tankar om framtida arbete inom dessa frågor tas upp. / The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how school personnel experience available student support. The study was conducted at a school in western Sweden, using interviews with six participants from the school personnel. Participants in the study were six people with different professions at the school where the professions: school nurse, school curator and teachers were included. The method used was a qualitative method. There are very few research reports that highlight issues of availability of student health, from a personnel-related perspective with the qualitative research method. With quantitative research method, there are more available research reports but they are still relatively few. This study resulted in six different themes that describe how and to what extent school personnel feel that they are available to students. This essay for the most part used the term student health, which includes the work of school personnel involved for the students’ well-being, both physically and mentally, following existing laws and regulations. The essay concludes with a discussion on essential elements and ideas about future work with these issues.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-126). Also available on the Internet.

Despite a multi-disciplinary, international literature, little research has drawn attention to the phenomenon of school refusal within the school. Most research on school refusal follows a positivist paradigm, focusing on the student, instead of examining the role of schools. Using a qualitative design and a social constructionist framework, this study explored how school personnel perceive school refusal, focusing on the social interactions, processes, and perceptions that construct their understanding. The study was conducted in a large school district in the Southeastern United States.Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with school personnel at the middle school (N=42), high school (N=40), and district level (N=10). Interviews at the school level included assistant principals, school psychologists, social workers, health services staff, guidance counselors, teachers, attendance office staff, and school resource officers. The district level interviews included personnel in departments related to guidance, psychology, school health services, and social work. Observational data was collected within the schools selected for interviews (N=10). Thirty-eight out of 68 middle and high school principals in the school district completed the Survey of School Refusal.Findings suggest that school personnel rarely use the terminology set forth by the professional literature to describe the spectrum of school refusal. Further, analysis revealed that personnel delineate students who refuse school according to their own categorizations formed through day-to-day experiences with students. Personnel's constructions of school refusal differed based on legitimacy of the reason for refusal, motivation for refusal, grade level, and barriers, which were physical, mental, emotional, social, and societal in nature. Overarching dynamics of typifications of students included parental control, parental awareness, student locus of control, blame, and victim status. These typifications influence how personnel react to students they encounter, particularly in deciding who needs help versus punishment presenting very real implications for students.The findings from this exploratory qualitative study make a significant contribution to this literature. The findings support the use of social constructionism in understanding school personnel's construction of school refusal. Implications for education, public health, and school health practice are presented and include recommendations for policy, training, prevention, early intervention, and future research.

Not available / text

Whistler Blackcomb Resort experiences the highest skier visits of any resort in North America and consequently demand at the ski school is high. Due to various factors, the daily number of lesson participants is highly variable and the best number of instructors to staff each day is correspondingly difficult to estimate. The consequences of scheduling incorrectly could lead to either overstaffing or understaffing. Overstaffing results in unnecessary costs; understaffing results in lost sales and customer dissatisfaction. A scheduling tool that can assist the Ski School in staffing decisions, therefore, is developed to minimize excess costs. Daily demand predictions are made using a forecasting model and a staffing policy is applied to it to obtain a recommended staffing level. The demand forecasting model is a regression model that takes into account pre-bookings, day of the week, holidays, and yesterday's demand. The staffing rules are determined through a Newsvendor-type model derived from a marginal cost analysis of the trade-off between overstaffing and understaffing applied to the daily demand forecasts. The project is intended to formalize a systematic approach to staffing for certain lesson types (pods) one day in advance. It will assist the Whistler Blackcomb Ski and Snowboard School, as a decision support tool, in the development of daily instructor schedules that rninimize any unnecessary costs.

No description available.

Since 1994, South African education has experienced major educational reforms that have resulted in a shift in the management and administration of schools. These educational reforms have had remarkable impact on the management of schools. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the perceptions of Head of Departments – (HODs) on the effects of educational reforms linked to globalisation on the professional lives and work of educators serving in the middle management positions at secondary schools. The study focused on the effects of educational reforms on the roles and responsibilities of educators serving in middle management positions in secondary schools in Pietermaritzburg. It was located within the critical paradigm, which aims at interrogating power relations and underlying forces that shape the dynamics of educational institutions in South Africa. It drew on contrasting views of social justice to analyse the educator’s experience. The neo-liberal construct of social justice and critical construction of social justice were used. The study was an exploratory case study that used focus group interviews and semi-structured in-depth interview methods as qualitative methods of data collection. Thematic analysis has been used to analyse data that has been collected. The globalisation theories and themes were used as lenses for data interpretation. Eight secondary schools middle managers (HODs) managing Mathematics and Physical Science from schools in Pietermaritzburg District participated in the study. Schools selected represented the racial, social, gender, economic and linguistic diversity of the province. The findings suggested that the effects of education policies influenced by neo-liberal globalisation have redefined the roles and responsibilities in ways that minimize the HODs autonomy and lead to the deskilling of educators who have been trained to perform their duties successfully and efficiently. The new education policies have coerced the educators including HODs to become ‘skills technicians’ degrading them as autonomous professionals. The neo-liberal policies exploited the HODs by coercing them to do both administrative work whilst being responsible for curriculum leadership. The HODs experienced dialectical tensions between allegiances to the subject (curriculum leadership) versus administrative role. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermarizburg, 2009.