Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2005. / Vita. "May 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 54-55).

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This study outlines the importance of entrepreneurship in developing and growing the economy. South Africa is low in entrepreneurial activity when compared to other developing countries. Considering South Africa‘s high poverty and unemployment rates, retrenchments, downsizing of big businesses, high failure rate among start-ups, and the valuable contribution that effective entrepreneurship can make towards economic growth and development. It becomes very important to determine how entrepreneurship can be encouraged and promoted to yield the desired results. The key lever to increasing the pool of entrepreneurs is through education. The answer that is evident is that entrepreneurship education should be taught in schools. The South African curriculum has made provision for the teaching of entrepreneurship from an early age. There is a widespread idea that entrepreneurship education would generate more and better entrepreneurs than there have been in the past and that education would increase the chances of obtaining entrepreneurial success. To achieve this, the study attempted to find out about the status of the Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) teachers, whether they have the necessary knowledge and skills to produce learners with an entrepreneurial inclination or not. Again the study attempted to find out whether teachers would like to be trained or not. The results revealed that teachers do not have the necessary knowledge and skills to implement the EMS Learning Area and need to be trained. The study addresses the importance of training teachers in EMS and the principles of entrepreneurship. The goal is to provide teachers with the rationale, mindset, tools, skills and knowledge needed to infuse the spirit of entrepreneurship into classrooms and to expand entrepreneurial career options. Knowledgeable teachers are needed to bridge the gap between the content on paper and the actual transference of the entrepreneurial skills and attitude to the learner in order to raise South Africa’s rate of entrepreneurial activity. Education and training should be improved so that the supply of people equipped to become entrepreneurs is increased. / Dissertation (MPhil (Entrepreneurship))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Business Management / unrestricted

Results from recent international assessments showed that the performance of South African learners in these international benchmarking assessments remained at rock bottom of the study rankings. These results not only paint a dim picture of the ability, work ethic and attitude of learners in the South African schooling system, but it also calls into question the performance intent of educators. This study becomes very important against the background that learners being taught in South African classrooms are increasingly facing stiffer competition in the market place due to the phenomenon of globalisation. The perception of the international community pertaining to the quality of teaching and learning in South African schools is bound to impact significantly on the keenness of foreign countries to engage with South Africa on a meaningful scale. The primary objective of the study is to improve the performance intent of school-based educators in the Uitenhage Education District. More specifically, the study investigates the relationship between the performance intent of educators (the dependent variable) and motivation, commitment to profession, commitment to the leader, community engagement and professional development (the independent variables). Given the constraint of distance, the sample was limited to schools in the Uitenhage Education District, and for this reason, convenience sampling was used for purposes of this study. Three hundred and sixty questionnaires were issued, of which 316 were returned (a response rate of 88%). The empirical results revealed all the independent variables impact significantly on the performance intent of educators at public schools in the Uitenhage Education District. The research findings cannot be generalised to all schools in the province because the sampled schools compose only a relatively small portion of all schools in the Eastern Cape Province. Recommendations for future research are also provided.

Core Self-Evaluations [CSE] are a person’s estimation of his/her own worth and ability (Judge & Scott 2009). This in turn, is related to Racial Evaluation which is a person’s internal evaluation of his/her racial identity (Diller, 2010). The Employment Equity Act (55 of 1998) makes provision for the employment of equity candidates who can acquire skills in a reasonable amount of time. This requires individuals to be able to learn and then achieve in outcomes-based assessment. Core Self-Evaluations and Racial Evaluation can have an impact on how individuals perceive themselves, and how they perform in education, training and development (Hanley & Noblit, 2009). This study explored the relationship between Core Self-Evaluation, Racial Evaluation, Learning and Outcomes-Based Assessment using an experimental design. The Core Self-Evaluation scores in this study (n=230) were consistent with levels found internationally (Broucek, 2005). There was positive Racial Evaluation, with a relationship existing between Racial Evaluation and Core Self-Evaluations. This means that part of a person’s identity as an individual is related to Racial Evaluation, with that Racial Evaluation being positive amongst young Zulu students at the University of Zululand. There was a statistically significant, but small correlation between Learning and Core Self- Evaluation and a relationship was also found between CSE and Outcomes-Based Assessment results. When Core Self-Evaluation is higher, Learning tends to be more likely. The same pattern does not hold for Outcomes-Based Assessment results. Among Zulu students, lower CSE is linked to improved Outcomes-Based Assessment results. Racial Evaluation has a small relationship with CSE. However, efforts to remedy apartheid may be directed towards socio-economic development and need not focus on boosting Racial Evaluation when it comes to young Zulu adults.

The ability to make realistic judgements of one’s performance is a demonstration of the possession of strong metacognitive skills. Metacognition involves the monitoring of one’s progress during learning, and the ability to modify learning strategies for increased effectiveness. Poor-performing students are at risk because they generally exhibit high levels of overconfidence when evaluating their performance, and may fail to adjust their learning strategies in time. This study aims to explore the accuracy with which students in the BSc Four-year programme (BFYP) of the University of Pretoria evaluate their performance in a stoichiometry test, as well as the influence of teaching on test performance and on accuracy of performance evaluation. The factors that students rely on when making performance evaluations as well as shifts in the reliance on these factors after teaching are explored. Finally, the study examines the relationship between bias in performance evaluation and the self-protection, self-enhancement motivational factors and gender. Data were collected by means of a three-tier stoichiometry test instrument, administered as pre- and posttest, as well as a questionnaire administered simultaneously with the pretests to a sample of 91 students. Each test item comprised a stoichiometry question, a confidence rating and a free-response explanation for the choice of confidence rating. The confidence rating was interpreted as an indication of expected performance. The test instrument allowed for the investigation of bias in performance evaluation in the pre- and posttests, the exploration of factors that students rely on when making performance evaluations and how the reliance on these factors shifted in the posttests. The questionnaires were used to collect data on self-enhancement, self-protection and gender. The study shows that the majority of the students were overconfident in the evaluation of their performance in both the pre- and posttests. Performance improved significantly in the posttest but accuracy of performance evaluation did not. Students were categorised as overconfident (OC), realistic (R) or under-confident (UC) based on the difference between actual and expected performance. Five subgroups were defined on the basis of accuracy of performance evaluation in the pre- and posttests. The five subgroups, labelled first by their pretest and then their posttest category, were the OC-OC (50 students), OC-R (13 students), R-R (11 students), R-OC (15 students) and the R-UC (2 students) subgroups. The results indicated no significant difference between the pre-knowledge and ability of the students in the four main subgroups. The students differed significantly in terms of performance in the posttest, their pre- and posttest average confidence scores and in performance gain. A significant difference was not found with regard to performance in the CMY 143 end of semester examination. These findings confirmed that we were dealing with four discrete subgroups with different characteristics. The OC-R subgroup achieved the highest learning gain by a significant margin. Moderate learning gains were demonstrated by the R-R and OC-OC subgroups and the R-OC subgroup did not achieve any learning gain at all. Careful analysis of qualitative data revealed that accuracy in the evaluation of posttest performance was associated with both a reduction in the prevalence of vague subjective judgments and with higher performance gain. Similarly, an increase in the tendency to base metacognitive monitoring on vague global judgments of performance in the posttest was associated with reduced accuracy of self-evaluation and lower learning gain. The tendency by the four performance evaluation subgroups to self-enhance or self-protect was not found to be statistically different. P-values greater than 0.05 in the pre- and posttests indicated that males and females were not significantly different in their accuracy of performance evaluation. The study suggests that an element of bias in performance evaluation may be beneficial to learning. Inaccuracy in self-evaluation in the pretest did not hamper learning for both the OC-OC and OC-R subgroups. Students who were over-optimistic about their performance in the pretest may have been less intimidated by the challenges of the new content material than those who were better calibrated (R-R and R-OC subgroups). Students who remained overconfident in the posttest, i.e. in the OC-OC subgroup did not gain from the learning experience as much as those who entered overconfident but became better calibrated. Those who entered tentatively as realists and then, with a little exposure, became unrealistic in their performance evaluation were shown to be the most vulnerable based on their lack of learning gain. Furthermore, increasing content knowledge alone may not be enough to raise the metacognitive ability of students. Finally, chemistry educators should be aware that students often make vague subjective judgements of performance even on a topic like stoichiometry, which requires predominantly procedural knowledge and formal reasoning. Our study has shown that this deficiency, when associated with poor accuracy of self-evaluation, may hamper learning gain. Copyright / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Chemistry / unrestricted

This research explores the relationship of self-monitoring with team leader behavior and work environment preference. Those who are high on self-monitoring demonstrate flexibility in their actions with others and are socially perceptive. They perform well in a variety of leadership positions and are viewed as leaders by group members. High self-monitoring types choose "socially" based careers, including teacher and psychologist, in which they adapt their interaction styles to effectively meet the demands of clients. The demands placed on a team leader appear to require similar characteristics to those that high self-monitoring individuals possess. As a team matures through different stages of development, the role of the leader ranges from director to facilitator to consultant. In order to effectively meet team needs, a leader must be socially sensitive to interpersonal cues and have the ability to assume various roles. In addition, given the fact that the position of team leader is a highly social type of career that requires behaviors similar to careers chosen by high self-monitoring individuals, it is likely that high self-monitors would prefer working in a team work environment over a traditional one. A survey methodology was used to assess the characteristics of 100 team members. No relationship was found between self-monitoring and flexible team leader behavior. However, when a job relevant version of a traditional self-monitoring scale was used, some of the data suggested that flexible people prefer a team work environment over a traditional one. Also, individuals who demonstrated ineffective team leader behaviors tended to show a preference towards traditional work environments.

The present study was designed to test the causal locus hypothesis, and to develop and explore the selfevaluational hypothesis. The causal locus hypothesis is based on attribution, which is a person's perception of cause. The hypothesis holds that persons making internal attributions (self-caused) for failure end external attributions (not self-caused) for success experience more negative postoutcome mood than persons making external attributions for failure and internal attributions for success. The hypothesis was derived from major theories or attribution, but was not experimentally tested until recently (Wollert et al., 1981).

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