This study examined Early Childhood Special Educators' perceptions of play as a developmentally appropriate practice in special education prekindergarten classrooms in one southeastern school district. Through purposeful sampling, eight prekindergarten special educators were identified because they held multiple teaching certifications and some held National Board certification. The participants had many years of experience in pre-kindergarten special education, and were professional development trainers, teacher mentors and or leaders in the prekindergarten special education community. These eight accomplished pre-kindergarten special education teachers were interviewed using an informal, semi-structured format about their beliefs concerning play, how they implement it in their classrooms as well as their perspectives on barriers to play. The participants identify the supports needed to implement play as a developmentally appropriate practice in special education prekindergarten classrooms. The findings reveal that Early Childhood Special Educators' believe in play as a developmentally appropriate practice and state that play is foundational to their practice in prekindergarten classrooms for children with special needs. Implications for future research and practice are included.

The purpose of this study, which is grounded in applied linguistics, was to investigate two ways of presenting vocabulary in a German language class in order to determine whether Frame Semantics is a feasible tool with regards to students’ vocabulary acquisition and culturally appropriate usage of vocabulary. In addition, this study examined learners’ attitudes toward the new method of vocabulary teaching and learning. A total of 34 university students enrolled in four second-semester German classes participated in this study. In the Control Group rote memorization techniques were used, while the in the Treatment Group frame semantics was utilized for the teaching and learning of vocabulary. The data was analyzed through quantitative methods. The quantitative data was derived from an online demographic survey, a vocabulary pre-test, two vocabulary post-tests (an immediate post-test and delayed post-test), a cultural appropriateness pre-test, two cultural appropriateness post-tests (an immediate post-test and delayed post-test), as well as an pre-test and post-test attitude scale provided as an online questionnaire. Analysis of the data indicates that there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups with regards to their cultural appropriate usage of the vocabulary items, and no statistically significant differences were observed with regards to vocabulary recall and retention. In addition, only the factor of enjoyment yielded significant differences with regards to learners’ attitude, while the factors of motivation, interest and confidence did not show statistically significant differences between the groups. Thus, the results indicate that both methods – Frame Semantics and the more traditional methods – are suitable for vocabulary learning and teaching as both methods resulted in an increase of learners’ vocabulary knowledge, including long-term retention. / text

The diagnostic imaging (DI) literature identifies that unnecessary examinations are occurring. However, there is a gap in the research literature: little is known about how physicians order DI examinations and what efforts need to be undertaken to reduce the number of inappropriate orders made by physicians. Such research is needed in order to promote patient safety and improve utilization of limited health care resources Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore how physicians order DI services, and what efforts could be made to reduce inappropriate DI ordering. Participants: 12 English speaking, non-radiologist physicians (general practitioners and specialists) participated in this study. Methods: Semi-structured key informant interviews were conducted with participants. Data from these interviews were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Results: DI ordering practices (both appropriate and inappropriate) emerged as the dominant theme in this research, specifically in the context of prevalence, decision-making, information support, contributing factors, and solutions. Particularly, the majority of participants felt that DI is overused in the medical field and identified contacting physicians (colleagues, specialists, or radiologists) and consulting the literature (using UpToDate® or Google Scholar) as their top methods of information support used in challenging clinical scenarios. Meanwhile, participants suggested factors that contribute to inappropriate ordering: patient demand, legal liability, and duplicate ordering. The majority of participants believed education could reduce inappropriate ordering. Participants also identified increasing communication about requisitions and restricting DI ordering authority as potential solutions to reduce inappropriate ordering. Conclusion: From the interviews, ordering (both appropriate and inappropriate ordering) emerged as the overarching theme. Findings were compared and contrasted to the current literature. Overall, this study revealed how human factors, such as patient demand, influence how a physician orders DI. As well, the majority of participants relied on the patient to recall patient DI history; however, literature suggests this method is unreliable. This study also offers unique insight into the physician’s perspective of what would be effective for reducing inappropriate ordering. These findings contribute to the field of health informatics as any technology developed to reduce inappropriate ordering (such as a clinical decision support system) needs to consider these human factors to support user acceptance. Through findings from this study, further research gaps emerged that can guide future research. / Graduate

This dissertation seeks to investigate the nature and extent of community participation in health education decision making for Torres Strait Islander girls at one Queensland high school. As such, the study is concerned with identifying stakeholders in health education for girls, describing the ways in which stakeholders participate in health education decision-making, and identifying the factors that promote or inhibit community participation in health education decision-making. The question presupposes several standpoints: firstly, that Indigenous communities want to participate in education decision-making and, secondly, that community participation would be desirable in producing good outcomes for Indigenous students. Thus, the literature review is concerned with critiquing discourses of community participation in Indigenous education, the effects on educational outcomes of Indigenous students when community participation is enabled, and reviewing previous research on educational decision-making in health education in Australia. Given the necessity for emancipatory research methodology in Indigenous research contexts, a critical ethnographic case study approach was chosen to investigate the research questions at a high school in the Torres Strait; building a critical case record from field notes, interview data, and documents. Using Carspecken's (1996) stages of data analysis, primary records were reconstructed and dialogically negotiated with participants, to describe system relations. Such an approach allows for power and control relations between researchers and research participants to be explicated, giving voice to usually marginalised groups, such as Indigenous students. This approach was also congruent with specific Torres Strait Islander research protocols, informed by Ailan Kastom, which were necessary to sensitively and successfully undertake the research. Data analysis was informed by a framework of Indigenous community participation theory, derived from Soliman (1995), Heslop (1998 ), Ministerial Advisory Council for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education (1999) and Stewart (1999), together with curriculum theory, from Bernstein (1976; 1990; 2000). This approach constituted a unique adaptation of Bernstein's pedagogic discourse theory to a Torres Strait Islander educational setting. The findings indicated that there was strong desire by community members, including students, to participate in health education decision-making at Bluewater High. However, the ability of different stakeholder groups to participate in health education varied, with teachers exercising the most power, and students the least. An in-depth, contextual analysis, in which pedagogic decision-making occurred, enabled a number of immediate and long-term recommendations to be developed. It is envisaged that these recommendations will enable greater community participation in health education decision-making for girls at Bluewater High, and more generally in other Indigenous educational settings.

Examensarbete.

L’adverbe est l’une des catégories invariables du discours. Le définir clairement n’est pas toujours chose aisée, tant cette catégorie grammaticale regorge de mots d’une grande hétérogénéité, non seulement du point de vue de leur nature, mais également du point de vue de leur rôle. L’adverbe peut ainsi signifier la comparaison, le lieu, la manière ou la qualité, l’ordre et le rang, la quantité, le temps, etc. Il peut encore servir de connecteur logique, de négation, etc. Lorsque l’adverbe permet de répondre à la question « où ? » posé autour du verbe, on parle d’adverbe locatif, traditionnellement appelé adverbe de lieu. C’est à cette catégorie d’adverbes que nous avons consacré notre étude. Les adverbes locatifs ont rarement fait l’objet d’une étude exhaustive, ce qui nous a amené à nous intéresser à leur classification dans le cadre théorique du lexique-grammaire. Pour parvenir à nos fins, nous nous sommes proposé pour objectif principal de mettre en évidence les différentes propriétés syntactico-sémantiques de ces adverbes locatifs. Mais avant d’en arriver-là, il était nécessaire de clarifier la notion très ambivalente de lieu, ce vocable permettant en effet de regrouper des réalités diverses telles que les lieux ayant un sens purement locatif (ex. ici, là-haut) et les lieux impliquant l’idée d’activités qui leur sont associées (ex. au cinéma, à l’école), pour ne citer que ces deux exemples. Il s’agissait donc de mettre en évidence cette classification interne au sein même de cette dernière notion de lieu. Ainsi, nous parlons d’adverbes locatifs non prédicatifs pour désigner les adverbes ayant un sens de lieu impliquant également un sens d’activité associée à ce lieu. De même, les adverbes locatifs prédicatifs pour parler des adverbes désignant explicitement une activité liée à un lieu tout en possédant une référence de lieu rendant possible une telle activité. Compte tenu de la rareté des études qui examinent de manière systématique le lien entre la notion de lieu et les adverbes de lieu, tout l’intérêt de notre démarche aura été d’élaborer une approche analytique qui rende compte des phénomènes sémantico-syntaxiques propres aux adverbes locatifs. Cette étude est d’autant plus nécessaire que l’absence d’une méthode d’analyse a souvent fait obstacle à l’établissement d’une classification des adverbes locatifs. / The adverb is an invariable part of discourse. Defining it with clarity is not a simple assignment, as this category in grammar is filled with words of great heterogeneity, not only from the point of view of their nature, but also from the point of view of their role. The adverb can thus mean comparison, place, manner, quality, order, rank, quantity, and time, etc. It can also be used as a logical connector, negation, etc. When the adverb allows the question "where?" to be raised around the verb, one speaks of locative adverb, traditionally known as adverb of place. It is to this category of adverbs that we have devoted our study. Locative adverbs have rarely been studied exhaustively, which has led us to consider their classification in the theoretical framework of the lexicon-grammar. In order to achieve our goals, we propose to highlight the different syntactico-semantic properties of these adverbs. But before we came to that point, it was necessary to clarify the very ambivalent notion of place, since this term allows us to gather diverse realities such as places with a purely locative sense (e.g. here, up there) and places involving the idea of activities associated within them (e.g. at the cinema, at the school), to only mention these two examples. It was therefore necessary to bring to light this internal classification within the very notion of place. Thus, we speak of non-predicative locative adverbs to denote adverbs with a sense of place that also implies a sense of activity associated with those places. Similarly, predicative locative adverbs to speak of adverbs explicitly designating an activity linked to a place while referring to a location allowing such activity to be performed Given the scarcity of studies that systematically examine the link between the notion of place and adverbs of place, all the interest of our approach will have been to develop an analytical approach that accounts for the semantico-syntactic phenomena specific to locative adverbs. This study is all the more necessary due to the absence of a method of analysis often hindered the establishment of a classification of adverbs of place.

När socialtjänsten har beslutat om att ett barn behöver placeras i familjehem måste barnet få åldersadekvat information. Att förmedla information till små barn är en utmaning som ställer krav på samtalsledarens förmåga att kommunicera så att barnet förstår. Syftet med detta examensarbete var att undersöka hur socialsekreterare och familjebehandlare beskriver att de förmedlar beslut om placering i familjehem till barn i förskoleålder. Sju intervjuer med anställda inom socialtjänsten har genomförts. Resultaten har analyserats utifrån salutogen teori med en utvecklingsekologisk referensram. Resultatet visar att informanterna upplever det som hjälpsamt att använda lekmaterial som hjälpmedel för att ge barnet en konkret bild av vad som kommer att hända vid placeringen. Informationen som förmedlas är situationsbunden och individuell. Informanterna belyser även att de anser det som viktigt att vara lyhörd för barnets behov för att kunna välja rätt information att trygga barnet med och på så sätt se till att det blir barnets samtal. I uppsatsens diskussionskapitel behandlas studiens oväntade fynd och förslag på fortsatt forskning. / “The conversation should be child-centred.” A qualitative study of social services informative conversations with children regarding family based foster care placements.   When placed in family based foster care, all children have legal rights to participation and to get age-appropriate information from the social services. Communicating information to young children is a challenge, and the purpose of this study was to examine how social workers and family therapists describe the procedure of informing preschoolers about placement in family based foster care. Seven interviews were conducted with employees in the social services. A salutogenic theory and a frame of reference based on the ecological systems theory of development were used to analyze the results. The results show that employees in the social services described it as helpful to use child-centred methods and to communicate with the children through play to visualise the placement and that the information provided is situational and individual. The informants highlighted the importance of being responsive to the child's needs in the very moment to choose what details to inform about, and that the child has to feel safe and the conversation needs to be child-centred.

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CAPES / O aumento na geração dos resíduos sólidos é um problema para a sociedade: encontrar formas para o seu equacionamento e disposição ambientalmente segura é um dos maiores desafios atuais em política pública. A gestão inadequada de resíduos gera uma série de problemas ambientais, sociais e econômicos. Assim, esta dissertação busca determinar as variáveis mais relevantes para proposição e avaliação de políticas públicas para a gestão de resíduos sólidos urbanos, aplicados ao município de Curitiba, no sentido de aprimorá-la, apontando adequações ou aperfeiçoamentos em seu atual modelo. O trabalho avalia modelos teóricos de gestão de resíduos, apresentando a proposição teórica de um modelo com base nos estudados. Este modelo serve como encaminhamento para a definição das variáveis mais relevantes, contando com a participação de especialistas, além de um método de análise multivariada. Tal método permite definir um modelo ajustado à percepção do painel de especialista. A pesquisa é exploratória e descritiva: utilizou-se, em um primeiro momento, levantamento bibliográfico e documental; em um segundo, fez-se o arrolamento das principais variáveis com especialistas. O procedimento utilizou a técnica Delphi de levantamento com especialistas da área, que colaboraram com a avaliação e complementação das variáveis presentes na gestão de resíduos. Com base na análise estrutural, o software possibilitou descrever um sistema que relaciona todas as variáveis que constituem o sistema, permitindo evidenciá-las de acordo com o impacto e influencia na evolução do sistema. Com base nisso, definiu-se um modelo de análise da avaliação e proposição da gestão de resíduos, que serve para uma avaliação das políticas de gestão de resíduos realizadas em Curitiba. Com relação aos resultados, Curitiba atende à maioria das variáveis consideradas mais relevantes. Entre elas estão: Custo; Planejamento; Fiscalização e informação; Aterro sanitário; Interação e participação; Geração per capita; Prevenção e controle; Coleta e Reciclagem, que são preponderantes em qualquer modelo e necessitam de desenvolvimento, avaliação e manutenção. / The increase in the generation of solid waste is a problem for society and there is a need to find ways for its equation. Environmentally safe disposal is one of the biggest challenges today. The management of municipal solid waste is essential to treat the waste, because inadequate management contributes to environmental, social and economic problems. This dissertation sought to determine the most relevant variables for proposing and evaluating public policies for the management of municipal solid waste, applied to the city of Curitiba. Their determination helps to improve solid waste management in the municipality, collaborating with adjustments or improvements to your current model. The study evaluated theoretical models of waste management and presented a theoretical proposition of a model from these studied. This model served as guide for definition of relevant variables and had the help of experts and a method of multivariate analysis to define the variables. The method allowed us to define a model adjusted the perception of expert panel. The research is exploratory and descriptive, as to their goal using bibliographic and documentary method and in a second time a survey of the main variables is used to experts. The procedure used the Delphi survey technique with specialists, who collaborated with the evaluation and complementation of variables present in waste management. After evaluation, a matrix was constructed, based on the answers given and then the matrix was analyzed by MICMAC © software, tool for structuring ideas. Based on the structural analysis, the software allowed describing a system where relationships with all the variables that make up the system are performed, allowing display the main variables that impact and can influence the evolution of the system. From this, an analysis model of the assessment and proposal for waste management, which served for a review of policies for waste management, was held in Curitiba defined. Regarding the results, Curitiba meets most of the variables considered most relevant. Among them are: Cost, Planning, Monitoring and information; Landfill; Interaction and participation, per capita generation; Prevention and Control; Collection and; Recycling, which are crucial to any model and require the development, evaluation and maintenance.

CAPES / O aumento na geração dos resíduos sólidos é um problema para a sociedade: encontrar formas para o seu equacionamento e disposição ambientalmente segura é um dos maiores desafios atuais em política pública. A gestão inadequada de resíduos gera uma série de problemas ambientais, sociais e econômicos. Assim, esta dissertação busca determinar as variáveis mais relevantes para proposição e avaliação de políticas públicas para a gestão de resíduos sólidos urbanos, aplicados ao município de Curitiba, no sentido de aprimorá-la, apontando adequações ou aperfeiçoamentos em seu atual modelo. O trabalho avalia modelos teóricos de gestão de resíduos, apresentando a proposição teórica de um modelo com base nos estudados. Este modelo serve como encaminhamento para a definição das variáveis mais relevantes, contando com a participação de especialistas, além de um método de análise multivariada. Tal método permite definir um modelo ajustado à percepção do painel de especialista. A pesquisa é exploratória e descritiva: utilizou-se, em um primeiro momento, levantamento bibliográfico e documental; em um segundo, fez-se o arrolamento das principais variáveis com especialistas. O procedimento utilizou a técnica Delphi de levantamento com especialistas da área, que colaboraram com a avaliação e complementação das variáveis presentes na gestão de resíduos. Com base na análise estrutural, o software possibilitou descrever um sistema que relaciona todas as variáveis que constituem o sistema, permitindo evidenciá-las de acordo com o impacto e influencia na evolução do sistema. Com base nisso, definiu-se um modelo de análise da avaliação e proposição da gestão de resíduos, que serve para uma avaliação das políticas de gestão de resíduos realizadas em Curitiba. Com relação aos resultados, Curitiba atende à maioria das variáveis consideradas mais relevantes. Entre elas estão: Custo; Planejamento; Fiscalização e informação; Aterro sanitário; Interação e participação; Geração per capita; Prevenção e controle; Coleta e Reciclagem, que são preponderantes em qualquer modelo e necessitam de desenvolvimento, avaliação e manutenção. / The increase in the generation of solid waste is a problem for society and there is a need to find ways for its equation. Environmentally safe disposal is one of the biggest challenges today. The management of municipal solid waste is essential to treat the waste, because inadequate management contributes to environmental, social and economic problems. This dissertation sought to determine the most relevant variables for proposing and evaluating public policies for the management of municipal solid waste, applied to the city of Curitiba. Their determination helps to improve solid waste management in the municipality, collaborating with adjustments or improvements to your current model. The study evaluated theoretical models of waste management and presented a theoretical proposition of a model from these studied. This model served as guide for definition of relevant variables and had the help of experts and a method of multivariate analysis to define the variables. The method allowed us to define a model adjusted the perception of expert panel. The research is exploratory and descriptive, as to their goal using bibliographic and documentary method and in a second time a survey of the main variables is used to experts. The procedure used the Delphi survey technique with specialists, who collaborated with the evaluation and complementation of variables present in waste management. After evaluation, a matrix was constructed, based on the answers given and then the matrix was analyzed by MICMAC © software, tool for structuring ideas. Based on the structural analysis, the software allowed describing a system where relationships with all the variables that make up the system are performed, allowing display the main variables that impact and can influence the evolution of the system. From this, an analysis model of the assessment and proposal for waste management, which served for a review of policies for waste management, was held in Curitiba defined. Regarding the results, Curitiba meets most of the variables considered most relevant. Among them are: Cost, Planning, Monitoring and information; Landfill; Interaction and participation, per capita generation; Prevention and Control; Collection and; Recycling, which are crucial to any model and require the development, evaluation and maintenance.