South Africa has witnessed radical policy reforms since the advent of the new democratic dispensation in 1994. As provincial, district and local practitioners developed responses to those new national education policies, implementation issues were revealed in all their complexity. Policy implementation became one of the most difficult challenges South Africa had to contend with. It necessitated the development of the capacity of the state and its people to implement policy. The complexities of the people development environment in South Africa create a range of challenges for development. The lack of multi-level empirical data on training effects continues to exacerbate this state of affairs. This context requires that comprehensive assessment mechanisms be put in place for training programmes aimed at the realisation of policy goals. The broad purpose of this inquiry, therefore, is to determine the impact of an education management development training intervention as it passes through different levels of the education system in South Africa - national, provincial, district and local. The following key questions guided this investigation. Firstly, how do stakeholder understandings of “education management development” transfer from one level to another in a cascade model of training? And secondly, what is the operational impact of an education management development-training programme at the different levels (i.e., province, district and school) of the education system? Questionnaires, free attitude interviews and observations were used as key data collection instruments. Data was analysed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative strategies for making sense of the training information. Data was interpreted against the backdrop of the literature on the “transfer of training”, and these findings are represented in the last three chapters of this thesis. This research generated four major findings, with a variety of subsidiary findings, which deepen our insights into policy implementation as it relates to education management development in South Africa. Some of the major findings of this study are that: a) The organisers did not in the first place conduct the baseline study on training needs and secondly, they did not take into consideration the organisational requirements of the anticipated training. This anomaly could ultimately compromise the outcomes of this intervention. b) The policy deployment processes of the North West Department of Education (of ensuring that the governmental policies for quality, cost and service delivery are understood from the highest to the lowest level of the organisation) are fraught with problems that undermined basic understandings of the Education Management Development training programme which was conducted between 1998 – 2000. c) Successful policy implementation depends crucially on resource allocation and, in the case of the Education Management Development Training Programme, the nature and magnitude of allocated resources e.g., transport provision could not guarantee positive training results; and d) The overly rationalistic view adopted by the trainers of the Education Management development-training programme did not take into account the complex contexts within which change unfolds. Resultantly, the changing of the roles of facilitators could not be planned-for in advance. The significance of this study is that it identifies the barriers to learning in training events, and sheds new light on the transfer of training problem that continues to undermine organisational change and human resource development. Some of the unique findings of the study can be found in the fact that the Expert Trainers could only recall a few intentions of the EMD modular training. The District Facilitators displayed limited knowledge of the disciplinary procedures in their areas of operation and there was limited conceptualisation of the EMD by the principals of schools. / Thesis (PhD (Education Policy Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Education Management and Policy Studies / unrestricted

This thesis deals with training dataset and validation dataset for Earth observation classification accuracy improvement. Experiments with training data and validation data for two classification algorithms (Maximum Likelihood - MLC and Support Vector Machine - SVM) are carried out from the forest-meadow landscape located in the foothill of the Giant Mountains (Podkrkonoší). The thesis is base on the assumption that 1/3 of training data and 2/3 of validation data is an ideal ratio to achieve maximal classification accuracy (Foody, 2009). Another hypothesis was that in a case of SVM classification, a lower number of training point is required to achieve the same or similar accuracy of classification, as in the case of the MLC algorithm (Foody, 2004). The main goal of the thesis was to test the influence of proportion / amount of training and validation data on the classification accuracy of Sentinel - 2A multispectral data using the MLC algorithm. The highest overal accuracy using the MLC classification algorithm was achieved for 375 training and 625 validation points. The overal accuracy for this ratio was 72,88 %. The theory of Foody (2009) that 1/3 of training data and 2/3 of validation data is an ideal ratio to achieve the highest classification accuracy, was confirmed by the overal accuracy and...

The main goal of the thesis entitled "The selected methods of social work with clients self-non sufficient in health care facilities" was to describe and to analyze methods used in activation of the elderly suffering from dementia. It draws a comparison of different settings and explores workers's attitude to the methods of activation. The text of the thesis was mapped out into five chapters. The first chapter was set into the context of old age and ageing. The second chapter is concerned with the issues of self-sufficiency and dependency of old age and other related issues. The topic of the third chapter is old age in relation with memory. It defines memory and memory disorders in the elderly suffering from dementia. The fourth chapter is crucial and gives an idea of non-pharmacological and other possible activities which are eligible for application in practice and are intended to reduce cognitive disorders of cognitive functions and behavior disorders. The theoretical part enters into research carried out in four facilities which care for clients with dementia. The research section is represented by a qualitative research where methods of a half structured interview and observation were opted for. The interviews were realized with eight practicing experts. The outcomes gathered from the...