Il est reconnu que les résultats électoraux au Canada varient grandement selon la région. Afin de trouver des explications à ce phénomène, il convient d’étudier comment les grandes régions du Canada se distinguent les unes des autres sur le plan politique. La présente recherche amorce cette étude sous l’angle de l’idéologie. Elle tente de déterminer en quoi l’idéologie politique diffère d’une région à l’autre du pays. Elle s’appuie sur les données des études électorales canadiennes de 2008. On a recours à des questions évaluant les préférences des répondants par rapport à plusieurs enjeux politiques pour répondre à la question de recherche. On conduit en premier lieu une analyse factorielle, qui identifie six facteurs qui ont structuré l’opinion publique lors de l’élection de 2008. Ensuite, des tests T sont conduits pour vérifier si les moyennes de ces facteurs idéologiques sont statistiquement différentes d’une région à l’autre. Les résultats montrent que les différences régionales sont souvent significatives et suivent les hypothèses. Toutefois, les résultats touchant à la privatisation de la santé ainsi qu’au Manitoba et à la Saskatchewan vont à l’encontre des attentes. / It is widely known that electoral results in Canada vary greatly from one region to the next. To explain this phenomenon, it is only appropriate to study how Canadian regions differ from each other politically. The current research is especially interested in regional variations in political ideology. The research relies on data from the 2008 Canadian Electoral Studies. It uses opinion statements to assess respondents’ political preferences to answer the research question. A factor analysis is conducted from these variables to highlight six ideological dimensions. Furthermore, t-tests are used to verify if regional differences on these ideological dimensions are statistically significant. Results show that differences across regions are very often significant and follow hypotheses. However, results regarding the privatization of healthcare and the Midwest run counter to expectations.

This thesis covers an experiment which explores how effectively skills that are gained in a digital serious game can be transferred to a real situation. The context of the experiment is the casual restaurant industry, with focus on the task of a food runner. The results showed to be unreliable when ruling out the chance element with the use of t-tests, which points to that the data produced were coincidental, however the limited deviation in the groups’ performances indicate that there is potential in the addition of a digital game to the traditional training material. This is learned from the reports of the experiments and the analysis of the questionnaires filled out by all the participators.

This study investigated earnings management in European firms. The private investors became victims of manipulated earnings where few laws offered regulatory oversight. The study forensically examined the attributes of earnings management identified using a discretionary accrual model published in Jones' work and Schippers' work. The firms' managers should fulfil agency theory when they made reporting decisions, and they should act in the investors' best interests to fulfil stewardship theory. The managers failed as they seemed to favor insiders when they reported manipulated earnings to outsiders like small investors even though the managers published financial reports conforming to the International Financial Reporting Standards. The investors depended on the decision usefulness of the reports. The study used the data of 432 listed firms in 11 code law nations. The paired t test identified significant differences between reported and economic earnings to find earnings management attributes and between economic and restated earnings to find earnings management cases. The research found that managers seemed to manipulate discretionary accruals to misstate earnings and reduce the decision usefulness of reporting. The data came from published financial reports and databases. The firms represented 11 nations and 9 industries that excluded banking and insurance. Almost 17% of nations and industry segments reflected earnings management attributes. About 29% of firms restated at least one annual earnings, and 84% of the restatements appeared to offset manipulation. The research results should prompt social change for small investors where regulators would redress the manipulation using stronger investor protection laws to improve the reported earnings quality and its decision usefulness.

Brazil has an active agrarian reform policy program, publicly organized by the federal government and publicly administered at the state level by the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform. The objective of the agrarian reform policy program is to retitle unproductive and underproductive rural lands to increase agricultural production and land use. Previous agrarian reform researchers have examined quantities of land redistributed, rural technology developments, and the impact of social movements on land redistribution, but a knowledge gap remains regarding the correlation of agricultural production yields in rural municipalities before and after policy program participation. The State of Ceará has undertaken continuous land redistribution efforts between 1975 and 2006. For this longitudinal study, an agricultural production yield t-test analysis was conducted for the Brazilian State of Ceará with the marked time-series data collection for 1990, 1996, 2000, and 2006. The research and evaluation of the agrarian reform policy program used publicly available, secondary data from the Government of Brazil's Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform. The correlated analysis was organized by group: municipalities with a high-rate of agrarian reform participation and municipalities with a no-rate level of agrarian reform participation. By marking the point of program participation at 1996, the time-series t test identified marked agricultural production increases as correlated to agrarian reform policy program participation. The results can be used to justify agrarian reform programs, to promote further rural infrastructure development, and to support poverty alleviation efforts.

Il est reconnu que les résultats électoraux au Canada varient grandement selon la région. Afin de trouver des explications à ce phénomène, il convient d’étudier comment les grandes régions du Canada se distinguent les unes des autres sur le plan politique. La présente recherche amorce cette étude sous l’angle de l’idéologie. Elle tente de déterminer en quoi l’idéologie politique diffère d’une région à l’autre du pays. Elle s’appuie sur les données des études électorales canadiennes de 2008. On a recours à des questions évaluant les préférences des répondants par rapport à plusieurs enjeux politiques pour répondre à la question de recherche. On conduit en premier lieu une analyse factorielle, qui identifie six facteurs qui ont structuré l’opinion publique lors de l’élection de 2008. Ensuite, des tests T sont conduits pour vérifier si les moyennes de ces facteurs idéologiques sont statistiquement différentes d’une région à l’autre. Les résultats montrent que les différences régionales sont souvent significatives et suivent les hypothèses. Toutefois, les résultats touchant à la privatisation de la santé ainsi qu’au Manitoba et à la Saskatchewan vont à l’encontre des attentes. / It is widely known that electoral results in Canada vary greatly from one region to the next. To explain this phenomenon, it is only appropriate to study how Canadian regions differ from each other politically. The current research is especially interested in regional variations in political ideology. The research relies on data from the 2008 Canadian Electoral Studies. It uses opinion statements to assess respondents’ political preferences to answer the research question. A factor analysis is conducted from these variables to highlight six ideological dimensions. Furthermore, t-tests are used to verify if regional differences on these ideological dimensions are statistically significant. Results show that differences across regions are very often significant and follow hypotheses. However, results regarding the privatization of healthcare and the Midwest run counter to expectations.

This study investigates the reasons for apparent differences in entrepreneurship rates in rural and urban areas using a Survey of Rural Kentucky Residents (SRKR) and the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) data. We estimate the determinants of dissimilar characteristics for rural and urban areas in two aspects: one is individual and contextual resources; the other is cultural tendencies of resources. The results of the analysis suggest that the difference in available individual, economic, and social support resources does not explain the observed difference in entrepreneurship rate. The results also indicate that gender, ethnicity, income, and number of children in the family have different effects on entrepreneurial intentions in rural and urban settings. The results suggest that policy makers need to account for cultural or geographical differences when designing entrepreneurial educational and support programs in order to enhance the establishment of new business between rural and urban areas.

The research question addressed by this dissertation is: How is the tourist experience formed and what constitutes the authenticity of the tourist experience for two market segments (motivated and not motivated by learning) of tourists visiting (political) cultural heritage sites in South Africa. The study explores the correlation between three types of authenticity, namely objective, constructed and existential on two independent tourist samples, motivated and not motivated by learning. This research was initiated for three reasons. The first reason forms part of the research problem; South African cultural experiences received the lowest ratings from the international tourists despite the fact that culture and heritage play a role in reimaging South Africa from Big 5 destination into ‘It’s possible’ and ‘Leave ordinary behind’. It was suspected that not all types of cultural heritage products justify such a low ratings, especially not the political cultural heritage sites South Africa is famous for. The second reason emerged from the academic literature on authenticity theories and calls from the influential group of postmodernist scholars to declare the objective authenticity obsolete and replace it with the existential authenticity. The argument that; the hyperreal nature of the postmodern experience and its detachment from reality makes the authenticity of the site redundant, seemed inapt for cultural heritage sites exclusively dependent on their historical and authentic values. The third reason was the inability of the postmodern paradigm to explain the new tourism phenomenon driven by the tourists search for selfdevelopment through authentic experiences. The new emerging paradigm, transmodernity seemed to offer better theoretical framework in explaining the omnivorouessness of tourists’ consumption and the authentic nature of tourist experiences. The correlational character of the research question required a descriptive correlational design and quantitative methodology. The selected research instrument for primary data collection is a self–administered questionnaire. The sampling strategy is a non–probability sampling, and the sampling method is a convenience or accidental sample. The data was collected from November 2010 to February 2011 at the Constitutional Hill National Heritage Site in Johannesburg. The final sample (436) consists of 254 foreign and 182 domestic tourists. The questionnaire was designed to identify the variables pertinent to each type of authenticity of tourists experience and of the resultant tourist experience. The data analysis provided very interesting results. Firstly, the results of crosstabulation proved that more than half (56%) of the tourists expressed strong agreement that the Constitution Hill provided them with authentic experience, hence a proof that political heritage sites are not responsible for the overall low experiential ratings of the country’s culture and heritage. Secondly, the results of the Spearman’s correlation coefficient proved that objective authenticity as an independent variable have strong positive correlation with constructed and existential authenticity hence a proof that objective authenticity cannot be declared obsolete and replaced with existential authenticity. Finally, the results of the t–test proved that motivation for learning and place of birth do not play an important role in how tourist evaluate and experience the authenticity of the site pointing to the omnivorous nature of tourist consumption. In line with the transmodern paradigm, motivation for learning plays a critical role in triggering the transformative, authentic experience distinctive of the existential authenticity. The results of the study also showed that 32% of tourists are in fact the purposeful, New Age, transmodern Cultural Creatives. Proposed theoretical model of authenticity of tourists experience presents a theoretical platform for future research studies. / Thesis (M.A. (Tourism))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.

The research question addressed by this dissertation is: How is the tourist experience formed and what constitutes the authenticity of the tourist experience for two market segments (motivated and not motivated by learning) of tourists visiting (political) cultural heritage sites in South Africa. The study explores the correlation between three types of authenticity, namely objective, constructed and existential on two independent tourist samples, motivated and not motivated by learning. This research was initiated for three reasons. The first reason forms part of the research problem; South African cultural experiences received the lowest ratings from the international tourists despite the fact that culture and heritage play a role in reimaging South Africa from Big 5 destination into ‘It’s possible’ and ‘Leave ordinary behind’. It was suspected that not all types of cultural heritage products justify such a low ratings, especially not the political cultural heritage sites South Africa is famous for. The second reason emerged from the academic literature on authenticity theories and calls from the influential group of postmodernist scholars to declare the objective authenticity obsolete and replace it with the existential authenticity. The argument that; the hyperreal nature of the postmodern experience and its detachment from reality makes the authenticity of the site redundant, seemed inapt for cultural heritage sites exclusively dependent on their historical and authentic values. The third reason was the inability of the postmodern paradigm to explain the new tourism phenomenon driven by the tourists search for selfdevelopment through authentic experiences. The new emerging paradigm, transmodernity seemed to offer better theoretical framework in explaining the omnivorouessness of tourists’ consumption and the authentic nature of tourist experiences. The correlational character of the research question required a descriptive correlational design and quantitative methodology. The selected research instrument for primary data collection is a self–administered questionnaire. The sampling strategy is a non–probability sampling, and the sampling method is a convenience or accidental sample. The data was collected from November 2010 to February 2011 at the Constitutional Hill National Heritage Site in Johannesburg. The final sample (436) consists of 254 foreign and 182 domestic tourists. The questionnaire was designed to identify the variables pertinent to each type of authenticity of tourists experience and of the resultant tourist experience. The data analysis provided very interesting results. Firstly, the results of crosstabulation proved that more than half (56%) of the tourists expressed strong agreement that the Constitution Hill provided them with authentic experience, hence a proof that political heritage sites are not responsible for the overall low experiential ratings of the country’s culture and heritage. Secondly, the results of the Spearman’s correlation coefficient proved that objective authenticity as an independent variable have strong positive correlation with constructed and existential authenticity hence a proof that objective authenticity cannot be declared obsolete and replaced with existential authenticity. Finally, the results of the t–test proved that motivation for learning and place of birth do not play an important role in how tourist evaluate and experience the authenticity of the site pointing to the omnivorous nature of tourist consumption. In line with the transmodern paradigm, motivation for learning plays a critical role in triggering the transformative, authentic experience distinctive of the existential authenticity. The results of the study also showed that 32% of tourists are in fact the purposeful, New Age, transmodern Cultural Creatives. Proposed theoretical model of authenticity of tourists experience presents a theoretical platform for future research studies. / Thesis (M.A. (Tourism))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.

The educational change brought about by the South African Constitution and the Language in Education policy has resulted in many parents choosing to send their children from pre-school to an English medium school, so that their children can become proficient in the English language. As a result, many learners are learning in a language that is not their mother tongue and are therefore struggling to acquire reading and writing skills. Although there are many misconceptions regarding the learning of a language, the underlying theory on how learners learn a second language through Cummins BICS and CALP theory is explored in this research. The main purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) on teaching English Second Language (ESL) learners in primary schools. The study further intended to determine the effectiveness of SIOP in the South African context. To facilitate the understanding of the problem statement of this study, an evaluation framework based on the Context- Input-Process-Product (CIPP) model of Stufflebeam’s model was applied. The research was carried out at one primary school who had predominantly ESL learners in the school and who had teachers trained in implementing SIOP. The main research question posed by this research is to determine the effectiveness of SIOP on teaching an ESL learner in a primary school in the South African context. The sub-questions of the research are to what extent does SIOP differ from traditional methods, how does SIOP affect teachers’ planning and instruction in the classroom; to what extent to the learners understand the content when the teachers implement SIOP and to what extent does SIOP contribute to the improvement of academic performance of ESL learners in content areas. To answer the research question, mixed methods was used to fit together the insights provided by qualitative and quantitative research into a workable solution and therefore make use of the pragmatic method as a system of philosophy. As qualitative data was collected first, followed by the analysis of the secondary data, the typology used for the research is the QUAL quan. Interviews and observations were carried out on teachers who are currently implementing SIOP using interview protocol and observation protocol and data obtained from the University of Pretoria was analysed to determine academic performance of ESL learners. Legitimation occurred at various stages of the research which included peer review and member checking, From the data collected through interviews and observations, the following themes emerged, namely (i) language focus; (ii) difference between SIOP and the traditional methods of teaching; (iii) planning and assessment; (iv) learner attitude towards SIOP and (v) Grade R influence. Although data collected from the University of Pretoria showed gains achieved, the methodology conducted in this research was not an experimental design. A paired ttest was used to determine gains made between the target school, comparison school and the whole sample. Therefore, tentative statements regarding the influence of SIOP on academic performance is thus made in this research. Although no experiment was undertaken for this research, the findings from the data show that the null hypothesis indicates that there is no significant difference between the scores of the baseline assessments and the follow-up scores. As the significant values (p-value) were less than .05, the null hypothesis can be rejected. As part of the analysis, the effect sizes were also calculated which indicates a large effect size for the total scores and reading scores while the phonics scale showed a medium effect and the mathematics scale showed a small effect size. Based on the results of the study, it was found that the programme needed some revisions to make better use of the existing opportunities. The following recommendations and suggestions are that an experiment design should be explored to ascertain actual contribution SIOP can make to an ESL class. SIOP should be implemented as a teacher development programme and possibly a module for teacher training at university level. Resources needs to be readily available for teachers to use which could contribute to the improvements of academic performance of ESL learners. Teachers should form planning teams with other teachers to share good practices and lastly adequate support is needed for the implementation of SIOP. The importance of this study is that it provides insight into and understanding of the role of implementing an intervention programme to improve academic performance of ESL learners. It also sheds light on the need for an intervention programme and the extent to which the programme can improve academic performance of ESL learners. The main contribution of this study to the body of knowledge was its insight into and understanding of a number of factors, categorised as inputs, process and outcomes, that had an effect of the implementation of the SIOP programme. The development of the conceptual framework was applied by the CIPP evaluation model, as a framework that illustrated the relationships and outcomes of the SIOP programme that had previously not been done. This study thus emphasises the importance of intensive research and proper planning of intervention programmes. The aim of this inquiry was to determine the effectiveness of a model of teaching that was developed in the USA. Throughout the research, the findings presented indicated that the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol would be a functional model to employ in South Africa’s education system and, if implemented correctly, would yield positive results. Therefore, this study was an initial step towards implementing a programme that would improve academic performance in schools, where the LoLT is different from the mother tongue. Although some valuable information was obtained, there is much scope for further research on how to evaluate the effects of SIOP on academic performance of ESL learners. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Science, Mathematics and Technology Education / unrestricted

National rank on international assessments, as measured in Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), gives a limited view of the data presented. This study used average scale score data from the TIMSS (1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011) that were then disaggregated based on content domains (i.e., number, algebra, measurement, geometry, data, earth science, life science, physical science, biology, physics, and chemistry). These data were graphed to show the growth of the U.S. national average scale scores in comparison to three top scoring countries (i.e., Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore), and three other post-industrial countries similar to the U.S. (i.e., England, Italy, and Australia) It was found that the eastern nations outperformed the western nations on science math question for the fourth and eighth grade. The gap between eastern and western nations grew from the fourth to eighth grades. For fourth- and eighth-grade science content domains, Singapore outperformed all other nations except in earth science where all nations were evenly matched. Additionally, percent correct statistics from the 2011 TIMSS Released Items were disaggregated based on subject (i.e., science and mathematics) and cognitive domain (i.e., knowing, applying, and reasoning). The released item scores, based on cognitive domain, were then averaged and the U.S. averages were compared with the averages of the above mentioned nations, using a series of t-tests. Singapore scored significantly higher in all categories except fourth-grade science cognitive domains knowing and applying. Hong Kong scored significantly higher in fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics cognitive domains knowing and applying and eighth-grade mathematics cognitive domain reasoning. Japan scored significantly higher in eighth-grade mathematics cognitive domains applying and reasoning as well as science cognitive domain applying. These findings suggest that the U.S. is lagging behind in some content domains and cognitive domains, but not all. The current study informs teachers, administrators, and policy makers of the specifics areas the U.S. needs improvement.