Co-teaching has been, and continues to be, a growing trend in American schools since the late 1990s. As the popularity of this service delivery model increases, there is an imperative need for empirical research focusing on how co-teaching affects academic outcomes of students who receive special education services. Evidence regarding the academic outcomes of co-teaching is limited, and reports mixed results. The purpose of this study is to provide a synthesis of research examining academic outcomes of co-teaching on students who receive special education services. Quantitative information from each research report was coded, an overall effect size was computed, and a moderator analysis was conducted. Results suggest a significant effect (g = .281, k = 32, p < .05) of co-teaching on the academic outcomes of students with disabilities when compared to students with disabilities who did not receive instruction in co-taught settings; though a larger effect was found among dissertation reports (g = .439, k = 25, p < .001). Additionally, a significant effect was found when examining the academic outcomes of students in co-teaching compared to the academic outcomes of students in a resource classroom setting (g = .435, k = 27, p < .001. Lastly, effects were stronger the longer these students were in co-teaching environments. Implications of findings and recommendations for further research are discussed.

This research study analyzed the sources of nutrition blog information as measured by frequency and type of sources used by nutrition bloggers. Since the use of online resources for finding health information has become more prevalent, it is important to further research the topic for the purpose of better understanding how our nutrition agenda is set by nutrition bloggers. Focusing on 20 nutrition blogs, the study content analyzed 3,156 blog posts during a one-year period from September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2012, yielding 5,263 sources. Additionally, in-depth interviews were conducted with the writers of all 20 blogs in July 2012. The findings showed that (1) nutrition bloggers are sourcing half of the time, (2) nutrition bloggers are citing a variety of sources that include both credible and less credible sources, (3) nutrition bloggers are finding and choosing sources in various ways that include both credible and less credible methods, and (4) there is no difference in the sources selected by men and women bloggers. Overall, this study shows the need to create best practices for blog sourcing that serve as guidelines for both bloggers and readers, with emphasis on guidelines for source frequency and credibility of sources.

This thesis deals with the manipulating practices in the political media coverage in the period before the elections to the House of Parliament of the Czech Republic in May 2010. It describes the types of communication in terms of its ability to influence and focuses on the effects of the media and its impact on the audience. It also deals with the theoretical framework of the issues of manipulating methods and techniques and their causes. It defines the function of media in terms of intentions and evaluates the current situation in the Czech Republic, including the existing control mechanisms. A part of this thesis is a comparative analysis that focuses on a detailed qualitative analysis of texts published in the dailies Mladá fronta Dnes and Právo and their comparison during the period under consideration.

This Master thesis "HIV / AIDS in the czech newspapers in changing times (1996-2009)" discusses the media coverage of the topic of HIV / AIDS in the czech newspapers: MF Dnes, Blesk and Hospodářské noviny in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2004 and 2009. The work confronts in the long-term overview the media agenda (the actual number of articles and topics that HIV / AIDS in those years dedicated to) with the real number of newly reported HIV positive and monitors the expanses of Ministry of Health on prevention in this area. The work responds to the question whather are the topics of HIV / AIDS media normally handled episodically, with emphasis on the story, identifies the main issues in the context of HIV / AIDS in the media, namely celebrities in particular frequent topic in the context of HIV / AIDS is deeply engaged. The work also confronts the results of media coverage of this topic so far incurable disease AIDS in czech newspapers with foreign studies on the ground of Media Studies. The actual analysis has two specific aspects of pursuing the use of different analytical tools. Quantitative content analysis looks at the articles that the newspapers reporting on the topic of HIV / AIDS appear. The second part adds a qualitative study on the topic of celebrities and HIV / AIDS. The aim of case studies is to show the...

The objective of the Master's Thesis Global problems of the current world according to National Geographic magazine is an analysis of the National Geographic magazine approach to informing about contemporary environmental problems. Using a qualitative content analysis the author aims to find out whether there are some specific routines or phenomenons appearing in the articles when covering the environmental topics in media. The theoretical part focuses on general description of the environmental problems media coverage, on explanation of the term globalisation and on contemporary global problems definitions. It also summarizes the 125-year history and the most important milestones of the National Geographic magazine. The practical part consists of research on media reflection of global environmental problems in reportages and their thematic anchoring. It is based both on local and international studies on similar topic. The summary presents and interprets the results of the analysis.

The subject of the presented paper is the analysis of the position of scene-setting adverbials based on parallel texts. The aim of the study is to find out the most typical position for placing of such adverbials realized by verbless construction and to determine the factors influencing the position in both languages with respect to differences between the Czech and English word order. The theory is based on the functional approach described in Brno linguistic school and is applied to 200 examples from the corpus Intercorp. Out of the given number of examples, exactly one hundred tokens belong to the translation direction from En to Cz and the second half to the opposite direction of translation. With respect to the English word order, which takes over some of the grammatical functions resulting in relative rigidity, scene-setting adverbials are usually placed in the final position. However, it is assumed that most languages have a tendency to place the most important information to the end of the sentence. It follows that one of the goals of this work is to describe the factors allowing these adverbials to be placed in this position with no effect on the communicative dynamism of the adverbials themselves as well as on other sentence elements. The term 'scene-setting' suggests that these adverbials...

The objective of this thesis is to evaluate alternative weighting systems to determine if they have the potential to improve the current weighting system of the Financial Secrecy Index (FSI). The FSI, a measure of countries' contributions to global financial secrecy, currently weights its 15 qualitative components equally. A web-based opinion survey conducted in January and February 2016 among academics, journalists, experts and other persons familiar with FSI serves as the baseline for assessing new weights. The new weights derived from the survey results are not significantly different from the equal weights in 14 out of 15 components. The survey results suggest that widely held opinion is consistent with equal weight assumptions. Statistical model selection criteria from information theory that penalize model complexity prefer in majority of cases the simple model over the more complex one even though more complex model provides better goodness-of-fit statistics. Alternative methods and analysis such as Principal Components Analysis is performed and discussed. The present work finds that, statistically, the weights should not diverge from the equal weighting system in use currently. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

La gestion des buts, définie comme la capacité à se représenter les buts et à les maintenir activement en mémoire de travail, jouerait un rôle central dans l'efficience du contrôle exécutif. Cette thèse vise à étudier l'évolution de cette composante au cours de différents âges de la vie, ainsi que l'influence de verbalisations imposées sur ce développement. Quatre études ont été conduites et ont révélé 1) que l'amélioration de la capacité à gérer les buts lors de la période préscolaire s'accompagnait d'une évolution qualitative du contrôle; 2) que l'évolution des performances en flexibilité de l'enfance au grand âge était spécifiquement liée au développement de la gestion des buts ; et 3) que les verbalisations imposées modulaient le développement de la gestion des buts en produisant un bénéfice plus marqué chez les enfants et les adultes âgés. L'engagement d'un contrôle anticipé, proactif, lors de tâches d'alternance semble favorisé par l'emploi spontané de stratégies visant à orienter l'attention vers le but de la tâche, à la fois pour récupérer précocement la représentation du but, et pour la maintenir activement en mémoire lors des étapes de traitement de la tâche. L'effet bénéfique de verbalisations imposées chez les enfants et les adultes âgés suggère que ces populations présentent des difficultés à gérer les buts lorsqu'ils doivent effectuer la tâche en silence. Ces difficultés proviendraient d'une immaturité ou d'un déficit du langage interne, ou du fait qu'ils ne comprennent pas l'importance de s'engager dans une préparation anticipée de la tâche, ou encore qu'ils n'ont pas conscience que le recours au langage peut être bénéfique pour effectuer la tâche. / Goal-setting, defined as the ability to represent and maintain task goals in working memory, play a crucial role in executive control. The current work aims to study how this component develops across different age groups. It also examines whether required verbalizations have an impact on this development. To this end, four experimental studies were conducted, and revealed 1) that improvement in goal-setting ability during preschool years was associated with qualitative changes in the control used; 2) that flexibility abilities from childhood to old age was specifically linked to the development of goal-setting component; and 3) that requested verbalizations influenced the development of goal-setting ability by producing benefits in children and older adults. The use of proactive control in task-switching could be promoted by the spontaneous utilization of strategies which enable attention reorientation toward task goals to retrieve goal representation and to maintain it in memory during the processing steps of the task. The beneficial effect of requested verbalizations in children and older adults suggests that these age groups encounter goal-setting difficulties when asked to perform the task in silence. Such difficulties may stem from immaturity or deficits in inner speech, from the fact that these age groups do not understand the necessity to engage in an advance preparation of the task, or from their lack of awareness of the benefits induced by verbal strategies.

The thesis is dedicated to the proper virtual economy setup of Massive Multiplayer Online Game to make the game competitive in this area to other products on the market. In addition to setting the economy on the example thesis includes a market analysis of computer and console games, comparison of virtual economy with real and comparison of the selected virtual economies based on defined criteria. The primary goal is to make a procedure for setting up the virtual economy and its verification. Another goals are the analysis of the games market, comparison of the games market economies and a demonstration of web game making. Game making is depended on its feasibility analysis, which is also included in the thesis. The work also verify the correctness of the settings according to the defined criteria.

The diploma thesis Comparation of the coverage of war conflicts in Yemen and Syria by the Czech media examines to what extent and in what way two wars, which have been going on for several years and are among the biggest humanitarian crises of the present, are reflected in selected media. The conflicts under investigation are the war in Syria and the war in Yemen. The aim of the thesis was to prove that although the two wars are comparable in many aspects, there is a considerable difference between their media coverage. The theoretical part summarizes and defines important concepts accompanying news and news selection and their impact, the role of the media in war and other concepts such as ideology or propaganda. The research part examines the individual reports of three selected news sites, which are Aktuálně.cz, Novinky.cz and iDnes.cz. Based on four theoretical bases, the variables in media content of selected media were investigated. Based on the analysis it was found that the Syrian conflict in the media space gets much more attention than the Yemeni conflict. Furthermore, it was found that while the war in Syria is most often put into the context of the actions of state actors, the most common theme of the reports on the war in Yemen is the development of the conflict. The third hypothesis...