<p>Previous studies have reported inconsistent results for people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in both biological motion and Navon tasks. Each of these tasks require both local and global processing and were used in this study to compare processing styles of both ASD and typical groups. In the biological motion study, the ASD and the typical groups completed an emotion and a direction-discrimination experiment with happy and angry point-light walkers, which were presented in four different stimulus conditions: upright, inverted, scrambled and random. Overall, the ASD group had higher reaction times and lower accuracy, but the effect of condition did not differ between groups. Both groups performed worse in terms of accuracy and reaction times in the scrambled (i.e., local information only) conditions, therefore revealing a global bias in the processing of biological motion information. In the Navon task study with the same participants, typical individuals exhibited a global precedence effect, manifested as lower reaction times for global stimuli as well as global interference in “look for only local digits” task. However, individuals in the ASD group did not, on average, show a local or a global bias. In a subsequent analysis, the ASD group was divided into locally-biased and globally-biased sub-groups. Now, when a three way analysis between typical and the two ASD groups was performed, the globally-biased group’s performance was not distinguishable from that of the typical group, while no global bias was observed for the locally-biased group. When these two groups were compared on the Biological Motion study, the locally-biased group had no reaction time difference across conditions including both biological motion and Navon tasks, unlike the globally-biased group, who displayed higher reaction times for the scrambled condition, just like the typical group did. Therefore, it is possible that the inconsistencies in the local-global processing literature of individuals with ASD may have resulted because the studies did not account for individual differences in processing styles within the ASD groups that may be variable, unlike typical individuals who have a global bias for most tasks.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)

<p> Increasing evidence indicates that giving individuals control over their practice schedule facilitates motor learning (Titzer, Shea, & Romack, 1993; Wu & Magill, 2004, 2005). A recent study within cognitive psychology (Son, 2004) found that individuals massed practice on tasks they judged as hard but spaced practice on tasks they judged as easy. The purpose of this experiment was to examine how self-regulated practice impacts motor learning and the strategies used by individuals as a function of task complexity. Participants were required to move a mouse-driven cursor through a pattern of coloured squares, pausing only long enough in each square to make an appropriate button press (white square=left button, black square=right button). Task complexity (4 easy and 4 hard patterns) was determined by the combined effects of the arrangement of the grid of squares and the hand used to manipulate the mouse (easy =dominant hand, hard=non-dominant hand). Participants were randomly assigned to one of eight groups: blocked, random, self-regulated, and yoked to self-regulated, performing either the easy or hard tasks. The number of switches between patterns were recorded as well as temporal and accuracy measures. The self-regulated groups were ineffective in acquisition, but showed the most stable and improved performance in retention, irrespective of task difficulty. Moreover, although switch strategies of the self-regulated groups differed between and within task complexity, the motor learning advantage was generalized. Taken together, these results reveal that an individual's strategic approach to practice may change as a function of task complexity, with no detriment to motor learning and adds to the growing body of literature that suggests self-regulated practice is an important variable for effective motor learning.</p> / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

There have been thousands of studies on teams and their performance, but there are still many unanswered questions. An important one is how an organization's reward structure supports the growing trend of using teams. Many organizations implement teams without changing the organizational systems to align with and support the use of teams, i.e., training, feedback, information and reward systems. As predicted by many authorities in the field of team effectiveness research, these teams often fail. One organizational subsystem that has been determined to be important is the reward structure. If the reward structure is not changed to support a team-based structure, the misalignment could negatively impact team effectiveness. This research investigated the relationship between reward structure and team effectiveness using a laboratory experiment. This experiment involved groups of students working as a team on a design problem. The independent variable is the type of reward structure, manipulated over three levels: interdependent (group), independent (individual) and mixed rewards (both group and individual). The experiment used a design task, intended to be more representative of project team work where team members were assigned a functional discipline and worked together to solve a design problem. The primary dependent variable in this study was team effectiveness: team performance as measured by the quality of the team's design, satisfaction of team members, and the ability and desire of team members to work together in the future. Other control variables investigated for their effect on these dependent variables included: cooperative behaviors, reward valence, effort, and autonomy preferences. Few significant effects of reward structure were found. The reward treatment had a significant main effect on both cooperation and effort, but little difference existed between reward treatments. Some unusual results were found in the relationship between effort and cooperation with performance. Both effort and cooperation were negatively related to team performance. Cooperation, satisfaction and ability to exist were all found to be correlated. No one reward structure was found to be significantly better than any of the others in terms of team effectiveness or team process. / Master of Science

The daily, weekly, and unscheduled tasks for school administrators have increased in number and scope over the years, however surprisingly little is known about what principals do on a day-to-day basis and how this varies across schools. Since the effect of principal leadership behaviors, specifically how principals manage their time to accomplish important tasks, is one key to the success of schools, it is important to understand what effective principals do to accomplish this. The purpose of this study was to find out what the differences are in how principals in high and low-performing middle schools spend their time and to determine what relationships exist between the principal's time-on-tasks and school performance. In the literature review, the researcher identified seven categories of time use to collect and classify time-on-tasks data. The categories include: (a) administration/operations, (b) organization management, (c) day-to-day instruction, (d) instructional program, (e) internal relations, (f) external relations and (g) other (Horng, Klasik, & Loeb, 2010). The researcher collected time-on-tasks data from principals of high and low-performing middle schools in Virginia and analyzed the data to determine what relationships exist between the principal's time-on-tasks and school performance. Data analyses revealed that there are significant differences in the amount of time principals at high-performing schools devote to each of the time-on-tasks categories, as compared to the amount of time allocated by their counterparts at low-performing schools. In this study, principals as a whole and principals in the high-performing subgroup spend the largest percentage of time on tasks related to administration and operations, while principals in the low-performing subgroup spend the largest percentage of time on day-to-day instruction. Data also suggest that time spent on tasks related to internal relations is positively correlated with student performance on mathematics and reading tests. When demographic factors are combined with the time-on-tasks categories, a regression analysis suggests that the strongest contributing factor to mathematics and reading test scores is the socioeconomic status of the school with a strong negative correlation between the percentage of students on free/reduced lunch and test scores for mathematics and reading. / Ed. D.

This study explores self-efficacy as an explanation for individual differences in participation in a manufacturing organization with a structured participation program. Participation covers three distinct dimensions of behavior: (1) decision-making pertaining to tasks, (2) good citizenship in the form of extra effort and helping others, and (3) contributing to improvement in work processes. Self-efficacy refers to an individual's belief that he/she can successfully perform an activity in a specific situation. The project was based on an action research design in which the first phase examined the dimensionality of participation self-efficacy, the relationship between participation self-efficacy and actual ratings of participation, and the relationship between perceptions of situational factors and self-efficacy. Exploratory factor analysis found preliminary support for the three proposed dimensions of participation self-efficacy and also for a fourth communication dimension. Weak (e.g., r=.27) and non-significant correlations were found between self-efficacy and actual participation ratings. Situational factors were examined as perceptions of barriers which were proposed to be inversely related to self-efficacy. As expected, negative correlations (ranging from -.28 to -.45) were found between perceptions of situational factors and participation self-efficacy. Phase two of the project evaluated a critical thinking training program designed to increase employee participation. A Pre-test Post-test! Nonequivalent control group design was used to study the influence of training on learning self-efficacy and participation self-efficacy. ANOYA and ANCOVA found no significant differences in post-training self-efficacy between the trained group and the control group. / Ph. D.

Previous research examining the impact of training and practice effects on modifying performance of fluid intelligence tasks (Gf) and crystallized intelligence tasks (Gc) were extended to include self-rated performance attributions among non-depressed and depressed older persons. The following general questions were addressed. How does level of depression affect performance on Gf and Gc measures and performance attributions? How does level of depression and degree of benefit from either training or practice relate to changes in attributional styles? The framework used for predicting shifts in attributional styles was the reformulated learned helplessness model. Three hundred twenty-five community-dwelling older persons completed the Gf/Gc Sampler, Beck Depression Inventory, and Attributions for Success/Failure Questionnaire at pretest, posttest (one week), and follow-up (one month). Between the pretest and posttest sessions, subjects participated in one of three experimental conditions; (a) cognitive (induction) training, (b) stress inoculation training, and (c) no-contact control groups. The results from univariate and multivariate analysis of covariance procedures provided partial support for the hypotheses. At pretest, both non-depressed and depressed older persons had internal attributional styles, although based on differential performance outcomes. The depressed persons were found to have more failure experiences as a result of their significantly poorer performance on Gf tasks, versus the non-depressed. Specific Gf training effects were documented regarding attributional shifts for the non-depressed, while there were no changes on their attributional style due to practice on either Gf or Gc tasks. In contrast, only differential practice effects were documented for depressed subjects across Gf and Gc tasks. The importance of assessing personality dimensions in older persons and their xelationship to training and practice effects were discussed, in addition to limitations of the study and suggestions for future research.

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The aim of this thesis is to create a collection of tasks that would address the students of secondary schools, secondary vocational schools and grammar schools by using a spreadsheet. Collection of tasks will respond to the theoretical background, which is mainly based on the requirements for the knowledge and skills to work with spreadsheets in the curricula of the Czech and Slovak secondary schools and ECDL standards. Other theoretical bases are the analysis of learning tasks in the books, a survey among secondary school teachers, through which we discover how the spreadsheet is used and what tasks the students dealt with this application. Collection of tasks will offer a wide range of tasks of varying difficulty allowing cross-curricular use. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in life, and learning is an activity particularly likely to be fraught with uncertainty. Previous research suggests that students and teachers struggle in their attempts to manage the psychological experience of uncertainty and that students often fail to experience uncertainty when uncertainty may be warranted. Yet, few educational researchers have explicitly and systematically observed what students do, their behaviors and strategies, as they attempt to manage the uncertainty they experience during academic tasks. In this study I investigated how students in one fifth grade class managed uncertainty they experienced while engaged in collaborative robotics engineering projects, focusing particularly on how uncertainty management was influenced by task structure and students’ interactions with their peer collaborators. The study was initiated at the beginning of instruction related to robotics engineering and preceded through the completion of several long-term collaborative robotics projects, one of which was a design project. I relied primarily on naturalistic observation of group sessions, semi-structured interviews, and collection of artifacts. My data analysis was inductive and interpretive, using qualitative discourse analysis techniques and methods of grounded theory. Three theoretical frameworks influenced the conception and design of this study: community of practice, distributed cognition, and complex adaptive systems theory. Uncertainty was a pervasive experience for the students collaborating in this instructional context. Students experienced uncertainty related to the project activity and uncertainty related to the social system as they collaborated to fulfill the requirements of their robotics engineering projects. They managed their uncertainty through a diverse set of tactics for reducing, ignoring, maintaining, and increasing uncertainty. Students experienced uncertainty from more different sources and used more and different types of uncertainty management strategies in the less structured task setting than in the more structured task setting. Peer interaction was influential because students relied on supportive social response to enact most of their uncertainty management strategies. When students could not garner socially supportive response from their peers, their options for managing uncertainty were greatly reduced. / text

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:02:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 5736.pdf: 2625805 bytes, checksum: 4561c12dbfe262f92a7207b44898afa2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-01-31 / This research has as its context the exploration potential of manipulative materials in mathematics teaching Geoespaço. In order to increase knowledge of the development and implementation of exploratory-investigative tasks and tasks of figural representation involving manipulative materials Geoespaço and having specific objectives the development and use of Geoespaço in different didactic sequences. The theoretical foundation takes the qualitative and quantitative analysis Proceedings of the National Meetings of Mathematics Education (ENEMs) from 2001 to 2010 and the Proceedings of the National Association of Postgraduate Education and Research (Anped) from 2000 to 2013, more specifically, on the use of manipulative materials from of Lorenzato (2006) and Bezerra (1962), on the theory of figural representations of Fischbein (1993) and on the exploratory-investigative tasks Bridge (2009). The relevance of this research is partly because of making clear the importance of making use of manipulative materials in exploratory-investigative tasks in various methodologies of teaching math. / Essa pesquisa tem como contexto a exploração das potencialidades do material manipulativo Geoespaço no ensino de matemática. Com o objetivo de aprofundar conhecimentos sobre a elaboração e aplicação de tarefas exploratório-investigativas e tarefas de representação figural envolvendo material manipulativo Geoespaço e tendo como objetivos específicos o desenvolvimento e a utilização do Geoespaço em diferentes sequências didáticas. A fundamentação teórica toma a analise qualitativa e quantitativa dos Anais dos Encontros Nacionais de Educação Matemática (ENEMs) de 2001 a 2010 e os Anais da Associação Nacional de pós-graduação e Pesquisa em Educação (Anped) de 2000 a 2013, de modo mais específico, sobre o uso de materiais manipulativos a partir de Lorenzato (2006) e Bezerra (1962), sobre a teoria de representações figurais de Fischbein (1993) e sobre as tarefas exploratório-investigativas de Ponte (2009). A relevância dessa pesquisa se dá pelo fato de tornar clara a importância de se valer de material manipulativo em tarefas exploratório-investigativas em diversas metodologias de ensino de matemática.