AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF KEITH B. REINHARDT, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION, presented on May 26, 2011, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: PERCEPTIONS OF FACULTY ASSOCIATION LEADERS: ROLES AND ESSENTIAL SKILL MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Patrick Dilley A specific perspective of how faculty association leaders function at a tangible level has yet to be presented. Past studies describe faculty leadership as a collective abstract idea or theme, disregarding the concept and importance of individual faculty leader's roles at an operational level. The purpose of the study was to identify the roles and skills of present-day faculty association leaders (FALs) within Illinois' public four-year universities with a collective bargaining unit and distinguish tangible actions of these individuals as they exercised their everyday roles in this professional capacity. A qualitative research design was used to gather data and explore perceptions and life experiences of twelve FALs at six Illinois public four-year universities with collective bargaining. A personal interview was conducted with each participant with the assistance of a researcher designed interview guide. FALs view their role as that of a contract manager: one who interprets, negotiates, and defends the contract in conjunction with informing their constituents to contractual matters of concern. The ability to communicate effectively was identified as the primary professional skill required of FALs. The ability to be an empathetic listener with the capacity to be open-minded and flexible to circumstances on-hand was identified as the foremost personal skill best suited for FALs. This research advances the contextual understanding of FALs as they go about fulfilling their daily roles and their need for preparatory training.

An empirical exploration of factors that facilitate priming in young children was undertaken utilizing sequentially degraded pictures (fragpix) developed by Snodgrass and her colleagues. The identification of fragmented pictures was studied by 288 children across four experiments. In the first two experiments abbreviated sets of fragpix were generated for use with young children. Experiments 3 and 4 manipulated five attributes of the priming stimulus to measure their effect on direct and indirect tests of memory. Experiment 3 was a scaling study that delineated age associated identification thresholds for fragpix. It also examined hypotheses regarding the impact of prior exposure and perceptual closure on indirect and direct tests of memory. During the exposure and test condition, 3-, 4-, 5- and 8-year olds were shown fragpix in descending degrees of fragmentation until they correctly named the picture. Snodgrass proposed perceptual closure as an explanatory mechanism for identification of incomplete pictures. To explore this hypothesis, following identification of each fragpic, half the children were shown the completed picture. This manipulation had no facilitative effect on identification or recall of fragmented pictures. Two measures of prior exposure, priming and transfer, were also computed. Age differences were found on picture identification, free recall, and picture recognition measures of discrimination and response bias. A linear trend was revealed on measures of priming for picture identification, and for picture recognition but not for recall. A similar method was used for each of the first three experiments: Fragpix were presented in their most degraded form with pictorial information systematically added until the picture was named. Snodgrass and Feenan (1990) suggested that priming might be equally effective if only single levels of fragmentation were presented. They reported that exposing adults to moderately fragmented pictures promoted closure and was more beneficial for later identification, than exposure to maximally-fragmented or nearly completed pictures. Experiment 4 tested this "optimal level" hypothesis with 5- and 8-year olds. Scores from Experiment 3 were used to select age-specific levels of fragmentation that made fragpix easy, moderately easy, or difficult to identify. Attributes of the priming stimulus were manipulated in Experiment 4 to examine the differential impact of varying exposure conditions on performance and on the magnitude of priming. Three manipulations occurred: One varied number of stimulus changes across levels of fragmentation, a second varied order of difficulty, and a third varied the nature of stimulus change (random or systematic). Manipulating the priming stimulus influenced fragpix identification and priming, but had little definitive impact on free recall. For both ages stimuli presented in a systematic rather than random order facilitated picture identification and the magnitude of priming. In addition, developmental differences emerged among systematic orders of presentation. Five-year-olds demonstrated optimal performance in picture identification and measures of picture recognition when there were multiple changes in temporal contrast, while order of difficulty (moderate to easy to hard) was more facilitative for 8-year-olds. A finding for a quadratic function for 8-year-olds on picture identification and magnitude of priming supported a moderately fragmented stimulus being an optimal prime, while for 5-year-olds, the relationship was monotonic. This pattern was not observed on the direct memory tests. It is argued that both perceptual and cognitive components of the task influence performance in an integrative manner on indirect and direct memory tests. A modified form of transfer appropriate processing is proposed as a reasonable explanation of the findings. / Graduate

This thesis explores the intersection of indigeneity and modernity in early-twentieth-century North America by examining Native Americans in competitive running arenas in both domestic and international settings. Historians have analyzed sports to understand central facets of this intersection, including race, gender, nationalism, assimilation, and resistance. But running, specifically, embodies what was both indigenous and modern, a symbol of both racial and national worth at a time when those categories coexisted uneasily. The narrative follows one main case study: the “Redwood Highway Indian Marathon,” a 480-mile footrace from San Francisco, California, to Grants Pass, Oregon, contested between Native Americans from Northern California and New Mexico in 1927 and 1928. That race and others reveal how indigenous runners asserted both Native and modern American/Canadian/Mexican identities through sport, how mainstream societies understood modern indigenous people, and to what extent those societies embraced images of “Indianness” in regional and national identities, economies, and cultures.

No description available.

For many decades in India, natural resource management (NRM) programs were implemented by government bureaucracies in a centralized, top-down manner. The programs were unsustainable and suffered from resource use inefficiency and inequity. In the 1990s, under pressure from civil society organizations and multilateral agencies, the Government of India and many State Governments introduced policies that decentralized NRM programs and mandated active participation of users in the management of resources. When implementation responsibilities were transferred to resource user-groups many of the problems associated with centralization could be reduced significantly. However, despite their proven capacity of being better resource managers than government agencies, the user-groups encountered difficulties as self-governed people's organizations. Participation of users declined and problems of equity resurfaced in many user-groups. This dissertation describes the research that examines the causes of problems in the governance of user-groups in villages of Mehsana District in Gujarat. Using an eight-fold criteria of good governance, the study looks at eight Water Users Associations (WUAs) that took over irrigation management responsibilities from the Irrigation Department. This program of decentralization of irrigation is called Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM). The assessment of each WUA on each of the eight criteria reveals a close link between characteristics of good governance and the process of democratization. It can be seen that the WUAs that performed well on participation, equity, transparency, accountability, rule of law and consensus-orientation were less likely to face situations of dysfunction than the WUAs that performed poorly on these criteria. These criteria for good governance are also the core elements of democratic governance. At the same time, the case-studies reveal the tension between the democratization process that is attempted within the WUAs and the historical and cultural legacy of the feudal, autocratic and patriarchal society that rural India has been for many centuries. The thesis supports the argument, with empirical evidence, that the decentralization process can be sustainable only when user-groups institutionalize democratic processes and the early leaders behave in a democratic manner. It also suggests that the transition from an undemocratic institution to a democratic one can be enabled when external support agencies play an important catalytic role. / Science, Faculty of / Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute for / Graduate

The purpose of this study was to develop and to test a paired-comparisons figural scale to measure preference for complexity. A Random Shapes Scale (RSS) consisting of 18 sets of 3 random shapes was constructed. In each set of 3, one shape was of high complexity, one of medium complexity and one of low complexity. The random shapes were chosen from the eleven hundred generated by Vanderplas. Two existing measures of preference for complexity, the Barron-Welsh Art Scale (BW) and the Revised Art Scale (RA) were also used. Students in architecture, art, education, law and engineering (N=292) were tested using the RSS. Three weeks later the same groups of students (N=184) were retested on the RSS and completed the BW and RA as well. The BW and RA were significantly correlated with the RSS in three of the five groups tested. The internal consistency of the RSS calculated over all groups combined was .66; the stability coefficient was .71. The analysis of variance showed significant differences among the five groups tested. Therefore the RSS does differentiate among groups on the dimension of preference for complexity. The majority of the items were highly correlated with total test scores. This indicates that the items are homogenous. The results of the statistical analyses lead to the conclusion that the RSS is a useful measure of a unitary dimension of preference for complexity. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Transfer in serial learning as a function of inter-list positional relations was examined in a serial to serial transfer paradigm. After learning a 16-adjective serial list to a criterion of two consecutive perfect recitations, 128 Ss, were given ten trials on a l6-adjective transfer task. There were four conditions of transfer defined by the positional relationship of Items between successive lists. First-, second-, and fourth-order derived list conditions and a control condition were used. Half of the experimental Ss were instructed as to the positional relationship between the lists while the remaining Ss were given no positional Information. The results indicated significant positive transfer in the DL₁ and DL₄ groups when compared to the control group. DL₂ performance was slightly superior to performance of the control group but this difference did not approach significance. Performance of instructed Ss was found to be significantly better than performance of non-instructed Ss. The instructions variable was not found to have a differential effect among conditions. The results were interpreted as being Incompatible with either the sequential or the ordinal-position hypothesis of serial learning, but as evidence in support of a relative ordinal-position hypothesis. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Retroactive inhibition (Ri) is the decrement in retention attributable to interpolated learning. The most common type of RI study is one in which a particular variable is manipulated in the acquisition phase of the experiment, and the loss of v/ords from an initially learned list is examined as a function of the manipulation. The literature on RI has been reviewed a number of times in the last several decades (i.e., Swen son, 1041; Slamecka and Ceraso, 19G0; and Keppel, 1963). Slamecka and Ceraso make use of the following classification for independent variables which have been investigated: 1) degree of acquisition; 2) similarity of materials; 3)cxtrinsic factors; and 4)temporal effects

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate several areas of agreement and disagreement as outlined by or suggested by given data related to concept formation and intelligence. For the purpose of this study, a concept was operationally defined as a response to a stimulus whereby that stimulus is defined as having a discernible parameter of meaning. The present study was also designed to investigate the probability that a concept is formed mechanically, as a function of an individual's ability to utilize his experience.

The objective of this research was to investigate relationship between dissociative and associative cognitive strategies for coping with the discomfort of running and running performance. Subjects were volunteers enrolled in two Dynamic Fitness classes which were taught during Spring Quarter, 1980, at Utah State University. Class A consisted of 36 subjects (24 male, 12 female) and Class B consisted of 28 subjects (13 male, 15 female). All pretest, posttest, and treatment procedures were conducted during the class's respective regularly scheduled meeting times. Subjects completed a 2.75 mile, timed, pretest run and were systematically assigned to one of three groups based on pretest time: 1) Control, 2) dissociation training group, and 3) association training group. Two training sessions were conducted to provide instruction in developing and using a cognitive strategy for both dissociation and association groups. Control group subjects also met with the researcher twice, but no instructions for development and use of a cognitive strategy were given. A posttest 2.75 mile, timed run was completed and subjects completed a posttest questionnaire. Due to differences in procedures for subject recruitment and weather conditions for the posttest run, data from Class A and B were analyzed separately. Analysis of covariance revealed no statistically significant relationship between teaching of a cognitive strategy and running time for either class. Posttest questionnaire information was also analyzed. For both classes, statistically significant negative correlations were found between difference for pretest/posttest timed runs and dissociation points as reported on the posttest questionnaire. Also t-tests of independent means showed that association group subjects reported significantly higher levels of association than control group subject for both classes. It was suggested that although training may have increased the reported use of a cognitive strategy it was not an important factor in running performance. The researcher suggested, instead, that willingness to exert oneself may have been the primary factor in determining performance in relationship to physical limitations.