The Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University is in the process of developing an assessment plan for measuring and evaluating each academic degree program (including student learning outcomes) in order to achieve objectives for institutional effectiveness. Assessment is a necessary component of any truly dynamic and progressive educational program. Assessment by evaluation can enhance student learning as well as augment instruction given by the professor. It also allows professors to determine which students reach or exceed learning targets and inform them so students can work to improve their weaknesses. Because there is no assessment plan currently in place for Texas A and M University's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences, I evaluated results from a previously developed survey that had been given in multiple years to students enrolled in Wildlife Conservation and Management (WFSC 201), an entrance level course of the department. In 2008 I administered the survey to students enrolled in WFSC 201 and to senior-level students enrolled in Conservation Biology and Wildlife Habitat Management (WFSC 406), an upper level course, to evaluate undergraduate students' beliefs on various wildlife issues, interest in animals, and knowledge status of endangered species. The research presented in this thesis contributes a general overview of assessment as it relates to undergraduate degree programs in wildlife and fisheries sciences. The focus was in particular to the evaluation of student conservation issues, animal interest, and species knowledge as it relates to student background (student classification, gender, hometown population size, and participation in youth groups. The results from analyses of responses to specific questions from a survey administered to undergraduates in the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University suggest that conservation beliefs and animal interest were highly correlated with gender and hometown population size. Students responding as males and having small hometown population size were more concerned about issues related to land or wildlife usage by humans and students responding as females and having large hometown population sizes were more concerned about issues related to habitat degradation and species viability. Males were also interested in mostly game species and females were interested in those of conservation, domestic, and herptiles. Lastly, the results from the knowledge question suggest that males attain and retain more knowledge of endangered species over females, and this relationship remains the same in non seniors and seniors. These results should be useful to the faculty currently and in the future as they develop an effective departmental assessment plan for the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University.

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo compreender em que extensão os professores de matemática estão atentos para o potencial de um trabalho pedagógico que leve em conta o contexto sócio-geográfico-cultural nos processos de educação escolar. Na busca por evidências fundamentada na escuta freireana e na postura etnomatemática uma análise de cunho qualitativo - utilizei as manifestações de 15 professores e professoras das escolas municipais da região de Perus diante de questões previamente preparadas pela pesquisadora. Significados foram atribuídos às manifestações desses professores numa trajetória de convergência, ficando assim evidente que, por um lado, há pouco ou nenhuma atenção por parte dos professores em atribuir valor à atitude de levar em conta os conhecimentos primeiros dos educandos. Por outro lado, outras questões - implícitas no trabalho como um todo - foram colocadas, mas não suficientemente explícitas ou configuradas em termos de conteúdo, para uma possível discussão crítica. / The present work has as an objective to understand in what extension the mathematics teachers are attentive for the potential of a pedagogic work that takes into account the socio-geographical-cultural context in the processes of school education. Searching for evidences based in the freirean listening and in the etnomathematics posture - an analysis of qualitative nature - I used the answers of 15 teachers of mathematics from the schools of the municipal district of Perus based on questions previously prepared by the researcher. Meanings were attributed to the manifestations/answers of those teachers in a path of convergence, and was evident that, on the one side, there is little or no attention from the part of the teachers in attribute value to the attitude of take into account the previous student knowledge. On the other hand, other questions - implicit in the work as a whole were included, but no sufficiently explicit or set in terms of content, for a possible critical discussion.

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo compreender em que extensão os professores de matemática estão atentos para o potencial de um trabalho pedagógico que leve em conta o contexto sócio-geográfico-cultural nos processos de educação escolar. Na busca por evidências fundamentada na escuta freireana e na postura etnomatemática uma análise de cunho qualitativo - utilizei as manifestações de 15 professores e professoras das escolas municipais da região de Perus diante de questões previamente preparadas pela pesquisadora. Significados foram atribuídos às manifestações desses professores numa trajetória de convergência, ficando assim evidente que, por um lado, há pouco ou nenhuma atenção por parte dos professores em atribuir valor à atitude de levar em conta os conhecimentos primeiros dos educandos. Por outro lado, outras questões - implícitas no trabalho como um todo - foram colocadas, mas não suficientemente explícitas ou configuradas em termos de conteúdo, para uma possível discussão crítica. / The present work has as an objective to understand in what extension the mathematics teachers are attentive for the potential of a pedagogic work that takes into account the socio-geographical-cultural context in the processes of school education. Searching for evidences based in the freirean listening and in the etnomathematics posture - an analysis of qualitative nature - I used the answers of 15 teachers of mathematics from the schools of the municipal district of Perus based on questions previously prepared by the researcher. Meanings were attributed to the manifestations/answers of those teachers in a path of convergence, and was evident that, on the one side, there is little or no attention from the part of the teachers in attribute value to the attitude of take into account the previous student knowledge. On the other hand, other questions - implicit in the work as a whole were included, but no sufficiently explicit or set in terms of content, for a possible critical discussion.

Research into various human values is of great social significance, and that is why it is receiving increasing attention. In the past, we were confronted with a too narrow definition of the subject of social psychology as a science on attitudes. Today, we can consider values and the evaluation process as one of the main themes of social psychology. Values condition the behaviour of social groups and individuals, therefore it is expected that, in the near future, empirical research and theoretical processing of values will become one of the most essential tasks of social sciences. Applicability of values and the whole value system depends on social goals; goals, which a society sets, change with the change of social order and so does the system of values. Therefore, every change of the social order brings about also a reassessment of values. However, even within a given social structure changes in values occur in relation to the following social development and changing social needs. Research into values is associated with major methodological as well as methodical difficulties; a number of psychological methods applied in international studies are based on different socio-economic conditions. The optimum solution can be seen in the selection of the most common method (the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey test) in the Czech modification, which was applied, as the main research method, in a research into the values of university students in Ostrava. The method, despite its shortcomings, is appropriate for determining the basic trends in the value orientation of university students. In today{\crq}s hyped time, the issues of life values of young people are much discussed and written about. This diploma paper deals with the value orientation of students at the Faculty of Health and Social Studies at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice and it also examines the factors that influence their directions of life. The theoretical part deals with the issue of philosophical, sociological and psychological concepts of values, culture and value system, value classifications and value orientation itself, the needs and attitudes related to the issue of values, the issues of values in various types of research studies focusing on the values of the youth, and the methods of studying values. At the end of the theoretical part, the value research results of other authors are presented. The practical part is dedicated to the research into value orientation that took place at the Faculty of Health and Social Studies at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice in the students specializing in the field called ``Specialist in Public Health Protection{\crq}q. The research examined the relations and attitudes of the students to emotional, social and material values. The method of questionnaire survey was used for data collection.

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No / In October 2002 the ex-RCIVI director of education and research Rosaline Steele wrote an editorial in the RCM Midwives Journal on problem-based learning (PBL), entitled 'the emperor's new clothes or a new way of seeing?' This is a response to that article.

Lärares planering och genomförande av matematikundervisning utgår i stor utsträckning från lärarhandledningen. För att kunna bedriva en rik matematikundervisning behöver lärarhandledningen därför vara designad på ett stödjande och kunskapsutvecklande sätt för läraren, vilket kan ses som att den talar till läraren till skillnad från andra lärarhandledningar som talar genom läraren. Utifrån idén tala till läraren har forskare tagit fram tre designprinciper för att visa på hur lärarhandledningar bör vara designade. Syftet med studien är att analysera en på den svenska marknaden relativt ny lärarhandledning och undersöka hur de tre designprinciperna framkommer. Analysen är genomförd med ett analysverktyg i form av nyckelord. Resultatet visar att två av tre designprinciper finns med dock med vissa begränsningar. Vår slutsats är att den analyserade lärarhandledningen mer talar genom läraren i stället för till. / Teachers’ planning and implementation of the teaching of mathematics is mainly based on the teacher’s manual for any specific textbook. For the teacher to learn varied and comprehensive teaching skills the manual needs to be designed to support and develop these. In this way they speak to, as opposed to through, the teacher as other manuals do. Based on this, researchers have formed three design principles to point out how teacher’s manuals should be designed. The goal of this study is to analyse a manual, newly released in Sweden, and investigate how the three principles are presented. The analysis was carried out through the use of certain keywords. The result shows that two out of three design principles have been applied, but not to their full extent. Our conclusion is that the analysed teacher’s manual speaks more through the teacher instead of to him/her.

In recent years, there have been incidents which decreased people's trust in some organizations and authorities responsible for ratings and accreditation. For a few prominent examples, there was a security breach at Equifax (2017), misconduct was found in the Standard & Poor's Ratings Services (2015), and the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (2022) validated some of the low-performing schools as delivering higher standards than they actually were. A natural solution to these types of issues is to decentralize the relevant trust management processes using blockchain technologies. The research problems which are tackled in this thesis consider the issue of trust in reputation for assessment and review credibility at different angles, in the context of blockchain applications. We first explored the following questions. How can we trust courses in one college to provide students with the type and level of knowledge which is needed in a specific workplace? Micro-accreditation on a blockchain was our solution, including using a peer-review system to determine the rigor of a course (through a consensus). Rigor is the level of difficulty in regard to a student's expected level of knowledge. Currently, we make assumptions about the quality and rigor of what is learned, but this is prone to human bias and misunderstandings. We present a decentralized approach that tracks student records throughout the academic progress at a school and helps to match employers' requirements to students' knowledge. We do this by applying micro-accredited topics and Knowledge Units (KU) defined by NSA's Center of Academic Excellence to courses and assignments. We demonstrate that the system was successful in increasing accuracy of hires through simulated datasets, and that it is efficient, as well as scalable. Another problem is how can we trust that the peer reviews are honest and reflect an accurate rigor score? Assigning reputation to peers is a natural method to ensure correctness of these assessments. The reputation of the peers providing rigor scores needs to be taken into account for an overall rigor of a course, its topics, and its tasks. Specifically, those with a higher reputation should have more influence on the total score. Hence, we focused on how a peer's reputation is managed. We explored decentralized reputation management for the peers, choosing a decentralized marketplace as a sample application. We presented an approach to ensuring review credibility, which is a particular aspect of trust in reviews and reputation of the parties who provide them. We use a Proof-of-Stake based Algorand system as a base of our implementation, since this system is open-source, and it has a rich community support. Specifically, we directly map reputation to stake, which allows us to deploy Algorand at the blockchain layer. Reviews are analyzed by the proposed evaluation component using Natural Language Processing (NLP). In our system, NLP gauges the positivity of the written review, compares that value to a scaled numerical rating given, and determines adjustments to a peer's reputation from that result. We demonstrate that this architecture ensures credible and trustworthy assessments. It also efficiently manages the reputation of the peers, while keeping reasonable consensus times. We then turned our focus on ensuring that a peer's reputation is credible. This led us to introducing a new type of consensus called "Proof-of-Review". Our proposed implementation is again based on Algorand, since its modular architecture allows for easy modifications, such as adding extra components, but this time, we modified the engine. The proposed model then provides a trust in evaluations (review and assessment credibility) and in those who provide them (reputation credibility) using a blockchain. We introduce a blacklisting component, which prevents malicious nodes from participating in the protocol, and a minimum-reputation component, which limits the influence of under-performing users. Our results showed that the proposed blockchain system maintains liveliness and completeness. Specifically, blacklisting and the minimum-reputation requirement (when properly tuned) do not affect these properties. We note that the Proof-of-Review concept can be deployed in other types of applications with similar needs of trust in assessments and the players providing them, such as sensor arrays, autonomous car groups (caravans), marketplaces, and more.