Thesis presented for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the School of Education Faculty of Humanities University of Cape Town, 2006 / There have been many national and provincial studies on children’s literacy levels in recent years in South Africa. However, none has determined the teachers’ own understandings of the core indicators of an effective reading teacher. During a preliminary feasibility study, the researcher was surprised to discover how many under-qualified teachers there were who had a limited professional understanding of current primary school reading instructions, approaches and practices. To assess more accurately these experienced teachers’ perceived professional competencies in teaching reading, the current study reports the development, refinement, validation and implementation of a conveniently self-administered profile of professional competencies designated the “Core Indicators of an Effective Reading Teacher Questionnaire” (CIERTQ). The researcher (the writer) gathered and analysed theoretically coherent feedback data from more than 1000 qualified, experienced and active reading teachers to establish a set of competencies describing teachers’ professional understandings of their pedagogical reading tasks. These clarified roles - as outcomes of the thesis - can be fed back to, and integrated with, teachers attending future literacy programmes and policies in economically developing countries, as well as serving to enable present and future teachers of reading to self-identify and improve possible aspects of their daily classroom activities. The present study is grounded in the social constructivist, socio-and psycho-linguistic theories originating from the works of Piaget (1969), Vygotsky (1930), Cambourne (2004) and Goodman (2005). Their foundational principles and literacies, together with relevant educator competencies specified and described in the South African National Education Department’s Norms and Standards for Educators document (2000) and in both the Foundation Phase (Grades R – 4) (1997) and Intermediate Phase (Grades 4 – 6) (1997) were defined and then applied to the derivation of all items in the CIERTQ. The CIERTQ instrument evolved through three phases of validation. First, the preliminary improvements in the questionnaire developed through seven formative versions as it passed through successive pilot trials with different small groups of self-selected reading teachers (teachers from grades 2 – 7, principals, subject advisors, learning support teachers, final year teacher training students and lecturers) from 1999 to early 2002. Phases two and three formed the major part of this research. Participants in phase 2 were introduced to Concentrated Language Encounter (CLE), an innovative reading programme implemented and expanded annually between 2001 and 2005, in 4900 new classrooms in 308 developing schools, in South Africa’s Western Cape region. Phase two involved further development and refinement of the CIERTQ. Version 8 was administered to 533 reading teachers in early 2002. It was re-administered to 360 teachers six months later. 173 of the pre-tested teachers were present at both the pre-and repeat workshops. After qualitative and quantitative analysis of the generated data, version 8 of the CIERTQ was improved and version 9 was reformulated in readiness for another large-scale trial. Phase three was the final administration of the CIERTQ, version 9, to a new relevant selfselected study group of 144 reading teachers who were attending the 2003 National Professional Diploma in Education course in teaching Literacy in the primary schools offered in the Education Faculty of the Cape Technikon. Throughout phases two and three several cautious varimax normalised factor analyses were engaged to refine and develop the questionnaire, within the context of teaching reading in economically developing schools in South Africa. The final instrument comprised 41 items which clustered into eight factors or dimensions of pedagogy. Particularly prominent factors with factor loadings between 0.50 and 0.72 were interpreted as (1) pedagogically strategic items (which included reading for meaning and application, reading for strategy development and other items of support); (2) reading for meaning and interpretation; and (3) reading for socialising (which included reading for research and surveillance). Almost all of the Cronbach alpha reliability coefficients for the eight sectors of versions 7 to 9 of the CIERTQ varied in the range of α = 0.70 – 0.87. Finally, the responses to the items were re-analysed and presented in relation to the foundational theories of literacy and to the South African’s Department of National Education, Revised National Curriculum Statement (2002) to produce an underlying coherent pattern of interpretation. Thus, overall, a valid and reliable instrument was produced, through refined consensus, with potential for use in augmenting further literacy research. Such future-orientated research is already a recently stated major policy focus of the current Minister of Education in South Africa for the years 2006 – 2009. This study presents a unique contribution to knowledge. The CIERTQ appears to have wide validity for primary schools that operate with multilingual reading cultures and diverse reading approaches, particularly in economically developing regions of South Africa and possibly beyond. The investigation makes recommendations for modifications to policy in terms of (a) introducing minor reform to the existing learning outcomes and (b) formulating an additional five new assessment standards for the South African’s Department of Education, Revised National Curriculum Statement (2002) Home Language document. For policy writers it may be useful to study the emergent well-defined sector names of the CIERTQ which convey a broader and a more holistic understanding of reading than those expressed in the policy document. The findings of the study answer the key research question: “Is it possible to develop, refine, validate and implement a profile of professional competencies of effective reading teachers for the South African context?” The answer is clearly in the affirmative, thereby corroborating and consolidating the current literacy theories of Cambourne (2004), and Goodman (2005) and the South African Norms and Standard for Educators (2000) document in South Africa’s unique educational context at the commencement of the 21st century.

Thesis (MBus)--University of Technology, Sydney, 2003. / This Project B has been submitted as a requirement of the Master of Business in Information Technology Management.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Master of Arts degree in the Center for Recreation and Tourism at the University of Zululand,1998. / The tourism industry is today recognised as being an activity of global significance. It is therefore not surprising that tourism is receiving attention from governments, the private sector and academics. Here, in South Africa too, tourism is receiving this attention yet there are communities in this country which still do not enjoy the opportunities offered by tourism. It is for this reason that a study of tourism constraints of Umlazi township residents is undertaken. This study aims at determining the constraints that are a hindrance to the Umlazi township residents' participation in tourism. The main concern of the study is why some people do not travel to visit other places in their own country. It emerged from this study that lack of finance is the main reason why the Umlazi township residents do not travel. Other reasons that were revealed in the study were lack of knowledge, fear of crime and fear of accidents. In view of these findings the study makes some recommendations. These recommendations are related to the problems of lack of finance, lack of knowledge, fear of crime and fear of accidents. To overcome the problem of finance it is recommended that communities form groups and organise saving schemes to help them towards saving for tourism. These groups can also organise group tours at reasonable cost. The private sector should organise incentive tours for their employees. There should be joint action among various provincial governments and travel organizations in the different provinces in order to promote domestic travel by low income groups. The government should also establish special programmes for the unemployed youth in order to allow them opportunities to travel. To deal with lack of knowledge, provision of information must be given priority in a country like South Africa, where a majority of its people have been left out of tourism in the past. In order to alleviate crime, people should not rely on law enforcement alone. Communities must be involved in dealing with crime. The government must provide counselling services for the victims of crime so that the fear of crime can be addressed. To encourage drivers and pedestrians to be careful on the roads, campaigns like arrive alive, siyabakhumbiila, drive alive, should be encouraged. This can contribute towards limiting the number of road accidents in this country. This should also be a continuous exercise and not just for certain seasons. The recommendations in this study are not intended only for the area in which this study was undertaken, but for all those communities that face similar constraints. / Financial Aid Bureau of the University of Zululand

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain valuable scholarly information that can be of immense value to the scholarly community. Millions of ETDs are now publicly available online, often through one of many digital libraries. However, since a majority of these digital libraries are institutional repositories with the objective being content archiving, they often lack end-user services needed to make this valuable data useful for the scholarly community. To effectively utilize such data to address the information needs of users, digital libraries should support various end-user services such as document search and browsing, document recommendation, as well as services to make navigation of long PDF documents easier. In recent years, with advances in the field of machine learning for text data, several techniques have been proposed to support such end-user services. However, limited research has been conducted towards integrating such techniques with digital libraries. This research is aimed at building tools and techniques for discovering and accessing the knowledge buried in ETDs, as well as to support end-user services for digital libraries, such as document browsing and long document navigation. First, we review several machine learning models that can be used to support such services. Next, to support a comprehensive evaluation of different models, as well as to train models that are tailored to the ETD data, we introduce several new datasets from the ETD domain. To minimize the resources required to develop high quality training datasets required for supervised training, a novel AI-aided annotation method is also discussed. Finally, we propose techniques and frameworks to support the various digital library services such as search, browsing, and recommendation. The key contributions of this research are as follows: - A system to help with parsing long scholarly documents such as ETDs by means of object-detection methods trained to extract digital objects from long documents. The parsed documents can be used for further downstream tasks such as long document navigation, figure and/or table search, etc. - Datasets to support supervised training of object detection models on scholarly documents of multiple types, such as born-digital and scanned. In addition to manually annotated datasets, a framework (along with the resulting dataset) for AI-aided annotation also is proposed. - A web-based system for information extraction from long PDF theses and dissertations, into a structured format such as XML, aimed at making scholarly literature more accessible to users with disabilities. - A topic-modeling based framework to support exploration tasks such as searching and/or browsing documents (and document portions, e.g., chapters) by topic, document recommendation, topic recommendation, and describing temporal topic trends. / Doctor of Philosophy / Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain valuable scholarly information that can be of immense value to the research community. Millions of ETDs are now publicly available online, often through one of many online digital libraries. However, since a majority of these digital libraries are institutional repositories with the objective being content archiving, they often lack end-user services needed to make this valuable data useful for the scholarly community. To effectively utilize such data to address the information needs of users, digital libraries should support various end-user services such as document search and browsing, document recommendation, as well as services to make navigation of long PDF documents easier and accessible. Several advances in the field of machine learning for text data in recent years have led to the development of techniques that can serve as the backbone of such end-user services. However, limited research has been conducted towards integrating such techniques with digital libraries. This research is aimed at building tools and techniques for discovering and accessing the knowledge buried in ETDs, by parsing the information contained in the long PDF documents that make up ETDs, into a more compute-friendly format. This would enable researchers and developers to build end-user services for digital libraries. We also propose a framework to support document browsing and long document navigation, which are some of the important end-user services required in digital libraries.

The "digital library" (DL) is a communication technology that has the potential to improve communication by removing temporal and geographic barriers and by introducing interactivity. This research focused on the adoption of digital libraries for electronic theses and dissertations (ETD-DL) at universities worldwide. ETD-DLs provide a means for universities to learn about implementing digital libraries in a networked environment.This research used diffusion of innovation theory to explore what has influenced ETD-DL adoption among Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) member universities. Communication channels were categorized as being either interpersonal or mediated. The perceived importance of these channels was assessed both within and between organizations. Although ETD-DL adoption is an organizational level decision it has implications for both the university and members of the university community. In some cases, these outcomes may be in conflict; for example, what is best for the organization may result in complications for an individual. Therefore the perceived importance of two innovation attributes, relative advantage and compatibility, were examined at both the collective and individual level.This study employed a web-based survey to collect data from the 133 universities in 26 countries that were NDLTD members in December 2002. Respondents were members of the university's "ETD Committee" and represented academic administrators, faculty, librarians, and computer systemsspecialists. Surveys were received from 95 respondents representing 65 universities in 14 countries. Twenty-one of these universities were outside the United States. Universities were from countries with a wide range of economic development.Results provide insights into university attitudes towards a technological innovation for knowledge dissemination. For example, results suggest that interpersonal channels of communication are more important than mediated channels within the organization. Additionally, interpersonal channels are more important for communication within the organization than between organizations. However, mediated channels of communication are more important for those universities that have decided to adopt the ETD-DL but have not yet implemented the union catalog or self-archiving options. There were also significant differences in the importance attributed to these channels by individuals in different jobs. The results also suggest strategies that could encourage development of digital libraries within a social system.

Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are an evolving genre of graduate student research that is gaining widespread acceptance among universities in the international community. ETDs are also beginning to diffuse slowly among American universities; however, a number of issues continue to work against more rapid adoption among intitutions in the United States. This dissertation examines ETDs as an evolving electronic research genre by (1) historicizing the situated development of its predecessor, the traditional print dissertation, in nineteenth century German and American Universities; (2) reporting on the current state of the Networked Digital Library of Electronic Theses and Dissertations, an initiative of Virginia Polytechnic University; (3) analyzing ETDs as a technological innovation undergoing the diffusion process according to Emmet Roger's Diffusion of Innovation Theory; and (4) presenting the results of an ETD pilot project case study carried out at the University of South Florida.

Great progress has been made to leverage the improvements made in natural language processing and machine learning to better mine data from journals, conference proceedings, and other digital library documents. However, these advances do not extend well to book-length documents such as electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). ETDs contain extensive research data; stakeholders -- including researchers, librarians, students, and educators -- can benefit from increased access to this corpus. Challenges arise while working with this corpus owing to the varied nature of disciplines covered as well as the use of domain-specific language. Prior systems are not tuned to this corpus. This research aims to increase the accessibility of ETDs by the automatic classification of chapters of an ETD using machine learning and deep learning techniques. This work utilizes an ETD-centric target classification system. It demonstrates the use of custom trained word and document embeddings to generate better vector representations of this corpus. It also describes a methodology to leverage extractive summaries of chapters of an ETD to aid in the classification process. Our findings indicate that custom embeddings and the use of summarization techniques can increase the performance of the classifiers. The chapter-level labels generated by this research help to identify the level of interdisciplinarity in the corpus. The automatic classifiers can also be further used in a search engine interface that would help users to find the most appropriate chapters. / Master of Science / Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) are submitted by students at the end of their academic study. These works contain research information pertinent to a given field. Increasing the accessibility of such documents will be beneficial to many stakeholders including students, researchers, librarians, and educators. In recent years, a great deal of research has been conducted to better extract information from textual documents with the use of machine learning and natural language processing. However, these advances have not been applied to increase the accessibility of ETDs. This research aims to perform the automatic classification of chapters extracted from ETDs. That will reduce the human effort required to label the key parts of these book-length documents. Additionally, when considered by search engines, such categorization can aid users to more easily find the chapters that are most relevant to their research.

Submitted by Angela Maria de Oliveira (amolivei@uepg.br) on 2019-03-01T13:37:52Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Alcione Jose.pdf: 2421103 bytes, checksum: ec3fb928e7f61d1ce186461a8b48e10e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2019-03-01T13:37:52Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Alcione Jose.pdf: 2421103 bytes, checksum: ec3fb928e7f61d1ce186461a8b48e10e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-08-06 / Este estudo, inserido na linha de pesquisa Ensino de Ciências e Mídias, se propôs a analisar as produções acadêmicas da modalidade stricto sensu, que tiveram como eixo norteador o uso de filmes comerciais no Ensino de Ciências. A busca por esses trabalhos foi realizada nos repositórios das instituições pioneiras na defesa de Teses e Dissertações na área de Ensino, bem como as que apresentaram os primeiros programas de Pós-Graduação stricto sensu na área, trabalhos estes que foram tratados e analisados por meio das orientações da metodologia de análise de conteúdo propostas por Moraes (1999) e pelo Software Iramuteq. Foram encontrados nove trabalhos, entre Teses e Dissertações que correspondiam aos critérios de busca estipulados. Quanto ao Iramuteq, no decorrer deste trabalho, este configurou-se como um potencial recurso para tratamento de dados em pesquisas qualitativas na área de Ensino de Ciências. / This study, inserted in the research line Teaching of Sciences and Media, set out to analyze the academic productions of the modality stricto sensu, which had as guiding axis the use of commercial films in the Teaching of Sciences. The search for these works was carried out in the repositories of the pioneering institutions in the defense of Theses and Dissertations in the area of ​​Teaching, as well as those that presented the first stricto sensu Postgraduate programs in the area, which were treated and analyzed through the guidelines of the content analysis methodology proposed by Moraes (1999) and Iramuteq Software. Nine papers were found between theses and dissertations that corresponded to the stipulated search criteria. As for Iramuteq, during this work, this was configured as a potential resource for data processing in qualitative research in the area of ​​Science Teaching

In Deutschland stehen vor allem die Universitätsbibliotheken zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts vor der großen Herausforderung, die sich rasch vollziehenden Veränderungen und die sich bietenden technischen Möglichkeiten zu erkennen und als Chance zu begreifen, sich vom Image angestaubter Archivieranstalten zu lösen und sich nach und nach zu ”universitären Informations- und Servicezentren” zu entwickeln. Auch für die Sächsische Landesbibliothek - Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB - im Folgenden nur noch SLUB genannt) trifft diese Standortbestimmung zu. Hier machte man sich etwa ab dem Jahr 1999 verstärkt darüber Gedanken, wie man in Zukunft Hochschulschriften digital verwalten und archivieren könnte.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:39:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 3573.pdf: 1424215 bytes, checksum: d37ee5cdd86907d29a12f727059a6e3f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-02-25 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / The growing demand for information along with a higher education policy effectively amounted to graduate to a higher level, changing its focus from simple teacher trainer for studies in applied research, especially in science and technology. Given this scenario it was found the need to create mechanisms that can assess the progress of science itself and this process was through the investigation of scientific production. Were created methods and tools to quantify and assess the scientific literature and among the many we can highlight bibliometrics. Through bibliometric analysis tools is impossible to quantify data and identify patterns. The work is justified by the absence of evaluation research in the field of history of education and also tries to fill a gap in studies that use theses and dissertations as an object of study. It aims to continue the studies aimed at mapping the area of education in Brazil, and identify what else has been researched, analyze bibliometric indicators and reflect on the distribution of subjects, represented here by lines of research offered in the country. This case study will be exploratory and explanatory because it aims to deepen understanding of the reality of trying to explain why problems. The research is given by the theses and dissertations that are inserted in the CAPES Theses Database. Underscore the role of CAPES as one of the main articulators of the evolution of graduate education in the country. As a tool of analysis used the Vantage Point software, which can transform files in TXT format a list divided into categories, which facilitates the processing and data analysis. Following this line of research we want to better understand not only the course of history in the area of education, but the area of education as a whole. It was possible to identify certain patterns within the scientific theses and dissertations, for example, major themes, key words being used, the main areas of knowledge and historical periods. We also collected quantitative data about type of work, higher education institutions, year, gender, funding, among other things. Thus it was possible to draw a general picture of the current stage of research development in the history of education, with everything and can serve as basis for further studies. / A crescente demanda por informação juntamente com uma política de educação superior eficaz elevaram a pós-graduação a um nível mais alto, mudando seu foco de simples formador de professores para estudos em pesquisa aplicada, principalmente em ciência e tecnologia. Diante desse cenário constatou-se a necessidade de se criar mecanismos que pudessem avaliar a evolução da própria ciência e tal processo de deu através da investigação das produções científicas. Foram criados métodos e ferramentas capazes de quantificar e mensurar a produção científica e dentre as muitas podemos destacar a bibliometria. Por meio de ferramentas de análise bibliométrica é possível quantificar dados e identificar padrões. O trabalho justifica-se pela ausência de estudos de avaliação na área de história da educação e também tenta preencher uma lacuna existente nos estudos que utilizam teses e dissertações como objeto de estudo. Tem por objetivo dar continuidade aos estudos que visam mapear a área da educação no Brasil, além de identificar o que mais vem sendo pesquisado, analisar indicadores bibliométricos e refletir sobre a distribuição dos temas, representados aqui pelas linhas de pesquisa oferecidas no país. Este estudo de caso terá caráter exploratório e explicativo, pois pretende aprofundar o conhecimento da realidade buscando explicar a razão dos problemas. O universo da pesquisa é dado pelas teses e dissertações que se encontram inseridas no Banco de Teses da CAPES. Destacamos o papel da CAPES como uma das principais articuladoras da evolução da pós-graduação no país. Como ferramenta de análise utilizou-se o software Vantage Point, que é capaz de transformar arquivos de formato TXT em uma listagem dividida em categorias, o que facilita o processamento e análise dos dados. Foi possível identificar certos padrões dentro da produção científica de teses e dissertações, como por exemplo, as principais temáticas abordadas, palavras-chaves mais utilizadas, principais áreas do conhecimento e períodos históricos. Foram também levantados dados quantitativos, com relação tipo de trabalhos, instituições de ensino superior, ano, gênero, financiamentos, entre outros aspectos. Dessa forma foi possível traçar um panorama geral do atual estágio de desenvolvimento da pesquisa em história da educação, podendo com tudo, servir de base para estudos posteriores.