The main issues, which arise in that research project, are connected with health dimensions. There are emphasised points, which contribute to the employees’ health and well-being, solutions, which organisations implement to prevent workers from diseases and illnesses, to track their current condition of body and mind and generally to improve their overall health situation. From the very beginning the main stress was supposed to lie on physical activity promotion being an integral part of health promotion at the workplace but the obtained information from the conducted interviews verified that idea. The research also touches other variables contributing to the employees’ health and cons tituting the idea of health promotion at the workplace, namely health profiles and Corporate Social Responsibility. It is argued who may benefit from workplace physical activities and to which extent such programs may succeed. Interviews showed double points of views according to the necessity to encourage employees to train within the organization. Basis for the discussion of the topic were interviews gained from the interaction with the staff of the organization Xylem located in Sweden in Emmaboda, a world leader in water solutions. The chosen methodology based on the case study appeared to be the most relevant to explore health issues thanks to the clear empirical example. The company was distinguished because of the sport and rehabilitation centre, which it had in its possession and which seemed to make Xylem be different from the competitors and gave advantages for the employees in the form of additional benefits causing going in for sport at the company’s expense. The results of the research indicate that health promotion at the workplace may be viewed as a part of Corporate Social Responsibility. The evidences for IV that perspective are presented with a proper motivation mostly in the conclusion part. The research intended to show to the readers to what extent health promotion at the workplace incorporating physical activities, health profiles and CSR is important, how it is regarded and how much attention, time and efforts is and should be devoted to deal with that dimension in a proper way.

This dissertation considers several coding techniques based on Reed-Solomon (RS) and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. These two prominent families of error-correcting codes have attracted a great amount of interest from both theorists and practitioners and have been applied in many communication scenarios. In particular, data storage systems have greatly benefited from these codes in improving the reliability of the storage media. The first part of this dissertation presents a unified framework based on rate-distortion (RD) theory to analyze and optimize multiple decoding trials of RS codes. Finding the best set of candidate decoding patterns is shown to be equivalent to a covering problem which can be solved asymptotically by RD theory. The proposed approach helps understand the asymptotic performance-versus-complexity trade-off of these multiple-attempt decoding algorithms and can be applied to a wide range of decoders and error models. In the second part, we consider spatially-coupled (SC) codes, or terminated LDPC convolutional codes, over intersymbol-interference (ISI) channels under joint iterative decoding. We empirically observe the phenomenon of threshold saturation whereby the belief-propagation (BP) threshold of the SC ensemble is improved to the maximum a posteriori (MAP) threshold of the underlying ensemble. More specifically, we derive a generalized extrinsic information transfer (GEXIT) curve for the joint decoder that naturally obeys the area theorem and estimate the MAP and BP thresholds. We also conjecture that SC codes due to threshold saturation can universally approach the symmetric information rate of ISI channels. In the third part, a similar analysis is used to analyze the MAP thresholds of LDPC codes for several multiuser systems, namely a noisy Slepian-Wolf problem and a multiple access channel with erasures. We provide rigorous analysis and derive upper bounds on the MAP thresholds which are shown to be tight in some cases. This analysis is a first step towards proving threshold saturation for these systems which would imply SC codes with joint BP decoding can universally approach the entire capacity region of the corresponding systems.

Achieving the Dream is a national initiative focused on helping more community college students succeed, particularly students of color and low-income students. Achieving the Dream’s student-centered model of institutional improvement focuses on eliminating gaps and raising student achievement by helping institutions build a culture of evidence through institutional transformation. This interpretive case study employed a mixed methods approach and utilized a sequential explanatory strategy to gather detailed information related to the research questions. The study examined, from an insider’s perspective, the progress made by an Achieving the Dream college in implementing practices that reflect the principles of the Achieving the Dream model of institutional improvement. The four principles of the model are: committed leadership, use of evidence to improve programs and services, broad engagement, and systemic institutional improvement. The study was conducted in two phases and involved a quantitative survey of all college employees and semi- structured, individual interviews with members of the college’s Achieving the Dream team. The quantitative and qualitative data were given equal weighting in the study and were integrated to the extent that the qualitative data collected provided supportive insights into the findings derived from the quantitative analysis. This study found the college made progress in implementing the practices reflected by the Achieving the Dream model. The study findings also provide insights into underlying factors that existed at the college related to its implementation of the initiative. The findings will supplement current knowledge about the efficacy of change models designed to help community colleges build a student-centered model of institutional improvement and the knowledge gained should not only benefit the college, but also provide useful information to other institutions involved in this initiative. / text

Purpose – The presented research aims to explain, describe and analyze the process of dynamic strategy development in high growth firms. Accordingly the research seeks to investigate how dynamic strategies are used within high growth firms and how strategic learning affects the process. Design/methodology/approach – The authors presents a review of theoretically relevant studies of high growth related to strategy, and two original studies examining the impact of dynamic strategy on high growth. A theoretical framework for the study of dynamic strategy processes is developed. The study comprehends eight interviews divided over five high growth firms, where high growth is defined by the OECD (2008) standard. Findings – In the study, the researchers finds significant evidence for the active and deliberate use of dynamic strategy in the high growth firms of the study. The implication of strategic learning on the dynamic strategies is found to be substantial. The findings shows that dynamic strategy development are used to a large extent and considered vital for achieving growth within in the high growth firms of the study. Research/theoretical implications/limitations – The findings demonstrate that dynamic strategy development is actively used in high growth phases of the firms studied. This has implications on the extension of previous research, as it shows the actual use of dynamic strategy and further emphasizes the importance of strategic learning within this process. With the important limitation that the study is considered too small to generalize over a larger population, which implies that further research on the subject is needed. Managerial implications – The findings provide guidelines for managers of how to handle strategy development in high growth, however due to the previous limitation this is presented as the way the high growth firms within this study handles this development. The guidelines could be used by anyone in managerial positions, thus increasing the understanding of how high growth firms handle strategy.

Studien behandlar ämnet högpresterande elevers läsutveckling i årskurs 1 ur ettlärarperspektiv där den teoretiska förankringen är det sociokulturella perspektivet.Det finns lite forskning kring ämnet, och det som behandlas är oftast elever mellan5–8 års ålder och forskningen är oftast fokuserad ur ett elevperspektiv. Denna studieär en empirisk studie som bygger på kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer medlärare som undervisar högpresterande elever i årskurs 1. Dessa har sedansammanställts genom en grov transkribering där resultatet visar på att de inte harnågon vidareutbildning i att undervisa högpresterande elever förutom läslyftet.Resultatet av studien visar även på att lärarna använder samma läromedel som deupplever bra och inkluderar samtliga elever. Dock ges de högpresterande elevernasamma uppgifter som de andra eleverna förutom i just användandet av läromedletDen magiska kulan. Både i Lgr 11 och skollagen står det skrivet att eleverna har rätttill personlig utveckling. Det betyder att alla elever har rätt till stöd och stimulans föratt utveckla sina kunskaper, oavsett om de har svårt eller lätt för att uppfyllakunskapskraven. Därför bör det forskas mer om högpresterande elevers läsning iårskurs 1 för att de här eleverna ska få den stimulans och det stöd de behöver för attvidareutvecklas istället för att de ska glömmas bort.

Resiliency is a critical factor in educational success; the gap exists in the research regarding the effect of resiliency in the educational success of African American female students. The purpose of this interpretive phenomenological research (IPR) study was to explore and describe the lived experience of single-gender education through African American female student alumnae to capture and distill their shared experience of educational resilience and competence. Framework drew on gender-relevant education, social capital, racial identity and socialization. Research perspective that participants were viewed consisted of critical race feminism theory and competency versus deficit or risk perspective. Research questions focused on how African American female student alumnae of single-gender educational settings described their experiences in and out of school as they relate to resiliency and competence. The IPR design consisted of 3 interviews per participant; 1 focused on the past, 1 focused on the present, 1 integrated past and present experiences. Interpretive phenomenological analysis was used to analyze data. Results showed the components that factor into the African American Academic Achieving Female (A4F) include racial identity and socialization, gender relevant education, support systems within cultural and social capital, Guts, Resilience, Initiative, Tenacity (GRIT), Cultural (Re)Appropriation Unity (CRU), personal spiritual relationship. Recommendation for the A4F framework to be used as a foundation to foster growth of the A4F. Social change implication is understanding how African American female alumnae of single-gender schools describe their shared experience of A4F on their lives to foster social change for the African American students.

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The purpose of this study is to increase the knowledge about how teachers work with digital learning material and high-achieving students in the subject of mathematics. The study is based on active teachers in grades two, three and four. We used semi-structured interviews to gain an understanding of what the teacher´s working method with high-achieving students looks like.  Digitization has brought about a major development in the school and based on our study, a clear use of digital resources can be seen in the classroom. The study shows that digital learning materials are being used by all teachers but to varying extents. The variation was largely due to different opportunities, limitations and the interest and knowledge of the teachers. However, most of the teachers were positive about the digital learning tool as the high-achieving students could easily receive tasks that were adapted to their level of knowledge. It also appeared that it was used to vary the teaching by offering different ways of working. Some teachers expressed difficulty in meeting the high-achieving students as they considered themselves to have a lack of knowledge in mathematics at a higher level. Furthermore, many teachers expressed that they have difficulties influencing digital teaching as it is characterized by several different factors. Through the interviews, it emerged that the teachers had different conditions depending on the organization, skill development and the school´s ability to purchase digital learning materials.

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