The position of public school superintendent is one that is filled with many challenges and opportunities. A more in depth awareness of the leadership characteristics of public school superintendents enhance the understanding of this very complex role in today’s society. The purpose of this study was to identify leadership characteristics of school superintendents in today’s complex education environment as perceived by school superintendents and school board chairpersons in Virginia. Additionally, this study gathered and evaluated perspectives from practicing superintendents and their board chairpersons to determine similarities and differences between the perceptions of these two groups. The population selected for this study was comprised of all 132 K-12 public school superintendents in the Commonwealth of Virginia during the 2008-2009 school year. Additionally, all 132 Virginia school board chairpersons were invited to participate in the survey. A total of 101 responses were received from the survey population of Virginia school superintendents. This represents an overall survey return rate of 76.52%. A total of 70 responses were received from the survey population of Virginia school board chairpersons, representing a return rate of 53.03%. The respondents were asked to read 17 statements regarding the activities and characteristics related to the job of superintendent and answer from 1 to 4, strongly disagree to strongly agree. In addition, respondents were asked to rank in order of importance ten superintendent leadership characteristics, with the value of 1 corresponding to the most important characteristic. The perceived ratings were then rank-ordered based upon the composite mean of the ratings of each individual leadership characteristics. Superintendents and school board chairpersons agreed that personal and professional integrity, honesty, and fairness are the most essential leadership characteristics for the public school superintendent. Superintendents and school board chairpersons also agreed that effective communication with board members, division and school staffs, parents, students, and the community is essential in superintendent leadership. Both superintendents and school board chairpersons perceived visionary leader as the most important leadership characteristic, relative to all the characteristics rated. Superintendents indicated that instructional leader was the second most important characteristic, while school board chairpersons perceived this characteristic as the third most important. Superintendents rated effective school board relations as the third most important characteristic, while school board chairpersons ranked this as their fourth most important characteristic. Statistically significant differences in the perceptions of superintendents and school board chairpersons were observed for the following characteristics: professional development experience, politically astute, and team builder. Superintendents perceived professional development experience to be significantly less important than did school board chairpersons. The superintendents perceived politically astute to be significantly more important characteristic than the school board chairpersons. Finally, school board chairpersons considered the characteristic of team builder to be significantly more important than superintendents. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this study was to identify leadership characteristics of technical school principals as perceived by technical center school principals, the superintendents, and the center's Joint Control Board of the regional technical centers of the Commonwealth of Virginia. A regional technical center principal position deals with a different administrative governing board, students from different high schools, and courses in the field of career and technical education. This study gathered and evaluated perspectives from the participating superintendents, Joint Control School Board members, and regional technical center principals to determine similarities and differences between the perceptions among these groups. The population selected for this study was comprised of the participating superintendents, school board members, and principals from all ten K-12 public school regional technical centers in the Commonwealth of Virginia during the 2014-15 school year. The results showed that the survey respondents ranked visionary and instructional leader as the top two characteristics for regional technical center principals. The results showed that superintendents and Joint Control School Board members ranked having a background or experience in career and technical education higher than principals ranked that characteristic. Joint Control Board Members ranked having a CTE degree significantly higher than principals and superintendents. Superintendents and Joint Control Board Members rated the principal's ability to articulate an instructional vision as having a significant relation to academic success higher than principals rated that characteristic. Survey respondents rated statement ten; persuasion is the ultimate tool for a technical center principal of public education, mean responses the lowest. All three survey respondents rated statement six; personal and professional integrity, honesty, and fairness are essential leadership characteristics for the public school regional technical center principal, mean responses the highest. Open-ended question sixteen, what other characteristics that are needed for the CTE leader of a regional technical center that have not been addressed?, revealed results that superintendents and principals indicated that personnel management was a valuable skill, that superintendents believed that building relationships with students and recruiting students along with having the ability to work with various stakeholders was important. / Ed. D.

Educational leadership has been studied and disputed for decades, but it remains an elusive topic. The superintendent is the lead advocate in the school district (Bjork, 2009). Research suggests that certain leadership characteristics are more effective than others (Gray and Lewis, 2011). The purpose of this study was to identify current superintendents' and active school-board chairpersons' perceptions of superintendent-leadership characteristics. As a follow-up study, it compared the perceptions of superintendents and school-board chairpersons in 2009 and 2016 to determine similarities and differences (Thornton, 2009). Superintendents and school-board chairs agreed that effective communication with board members, division and school staff, parents, students, and the community is essential in superintendent leadership. Superintendents and school-board chairs also agreed that personal and professional integrity, honesty, and fairness are essential leadership characteristics for public-school superintendents. Superintendents and school-board chairs ranked instructional leader and visionary leader as the two most essential characteristics of the position of superintendent. In 2009, the superintendents perceived instructional leader and visionary leader to be the most essential characteristics. In 2016, superintendents also rated instructional leader and visionary leader as the two most essential characteristics. In both 2009 and 2016, school-board chairs identified visionary leadership as the most essential characteristic. / Ed. D.

Yes / There is no consensus in the literature as to which stock characteristic best explains returns. In this study, we employ a novel econometric approach better suited than the traditional characteristic sorting method to answer this question for the UK market. We evaluate the relative explanatory power of market, size, momentum, volatility, liquidity and book-to-market factors in a semiparametric characteristic-based factor model which does not require constructing characteristic portfolios. We find that momentum is the most important factor and liquidity is the least important based on their relative contribution to the fit of the model and the proportion of sample months for which factor returns are significant. Our evidence supports the view that irrational investor behaviour may drive stock returns.

The problem of this study was twofold: first, to determine what personal and social characteristics of normal American preadolescent children are revealed in research studies completed since 1950; and, second, to integrate this research into a pattern from which implications could be drawn for use by persons who work with preadolescents.

The major purposes of this study are described as follows: (1) to determine if education majors, classified according to grade-level preference (elementary), subject-matter concentration (secondary), and sequential stage in the teacher education program, differ significantly in certain teaching-related personal and social characteristics; (2) to determine if estimates of certain teaching-related personal and social characteristics of education majors, classified according to grade-level preference (elementary) and subject-matter concentration (secondary) tend to form intercorrelated families of characteristics; (3) to determine if elementary and secondary education students at progressive stages in the teacher education sequence tend to become more or less like experienced teachers comprising the Basic Analysis Sample of the Teacher Characteristics Study.

The method of characteristics (MOC) is a deterministic transport method that has been applied to large-scale problems including those in reactor physics and radiative transfer. Long characteristics, (LC) methods, have been used extensively to discretize and solve transport problems in the spatial domain. There is a need for an equally adequate time-dependent discretization for these transport problems. The new contributions from this research include the development of a space-time long characteristic (STLC) method with various source approximations including several that employ a piece-wise linear (PWL) approximation spatially. In the prism-PWL (PPWL) method the coefficient of each PWL spatial function is linear in time in each space-time cell. Along with STLC, a PWL-LC method is developed for steady-state problems in (x, y) and (x, y, z). The methods developed in this work use least-squares projections to determine the coefficients of their source approximations. This work presents a detailed asymptotic analysis of the PWL-LC and STLC methods in the thick diffusion limit, which is of special interest in radiative transfer problems. This is the first such analysis reported for LC methods and these new methods are the first that are expected to perform well in this limit. Results from test problems executed with a modified version of the Parallel Deterministic Transport code, PDT, show the PWL-LC and STLC methods are more accurate than current methods for streaming problems. From asymptotic analysis and test problems, it is found that the steady-state PWL-LC method is accurate in the thick diffusion limit with solutions similar to those of analogous discontinuous finite element method, DFEM, solutions. Similarly, the PPWL-STLC method is found to be accurate in time-dependent thick diffusive problems. STLC is also a promising method for massively parallel applications because it permits the use of track-based sweeping, which appears to have significant advantages over cell-based sweeping. This is a key topic recommended for further research.

Discretization and solving of the transport equation has been an area of great research where many methods have been developed. Under the deterministic transport methods, the method of characteristics, MOC, is one such discretization and solution method that has been applied to large-scale problems. Although these MOC, specifically long characteristics, LC, have been thoroughly applied to discretize and solve transport problems in the spatial domain, there is a need for an equally adequate time-dependent discretization. A method has been developed that uses LC discretization of the time and space variables in solving the transport equation. This space-time long characteristic, STLC, method is a discrete ordinates method that applies LC discretization in space and time and employs a least-squares approximation of sources such as the scattering source in each cell. This method encounters the same problems that previous spatial LC methods have dealt with concerning achieving all of the following: particle conservation, exact solution along a ray, and smooth variation in reaction rate for specific problems. However, quantities that preserve conservation in each cell can also be produced with this method and compared to the non-conservative results from this method to determine the extent to which this STLC method addresses the previous problems. Results from several test problems show that this STLC method produces conservative and non-conservative solutions that are very similar for most cases and the difference between them vanishes as track spacing is refined. These quantities are also compared to the results produced from a traditional linear discontinuous spatial discretization with finite difference time discretization. It is found that this STLC method is more accurate for streaming-dominate and scattering-dominate test problems. Also, the solution from this STLC method approaches the steady-state diffusion limit solution from a traditional LD method. Through asymptotic analysis and test problems, this STLC method produces a time-dependent diffusion solution in the thick diffusive limit that is accurate to O(E) and is similar to a continuous linear FEM discretization method in space with time differencing. Application of this method in parallel looks promising, mostly due to the ray independence along which the solution is computed in this method.

Abstract The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of environment, strategy, and organizational characteristics on the performance of accounting information systems (AIS). The degree of environment competition (EC) and perceived environmental uncertainty (EU) were adopted as the variables of environment. This research divided strategy into four dimensions: cost leadership (CL), marketing differential (MD), innovation differential (ID), and strategy breadth (SB). Organizational characteristics were measured by organic organization structure (OS) and task uncertainty (TU). The research also chose information scope (IS), timeliness (TI), aggregation (AG) and integration (IN) as the AIS characteristics to be studied within each dimension. User participation (UP) and top management support (TS) were adopted as the variables of organization support. User satisfaction (US), operation improvement (OP), and managerial performance (MP) were used as the surrogate to measure the performance of AIS. The responses of 143 managers were drawn from a cross-industry sample in Taiwan. The path analysis, MANOVA, and OLS regression were employed to test the hypotheses. The empirical results were as follow: First, the study illustrated the result of research model. (a) The degree of EC has direct and significant effect on IS and IN. And EU only has significant effect on IS. Besides, EC also has direct and significant effect on UP and TS. (b) This research find that CL has significant negative effect on IS, AG, IN, and TS. MD also has significant negative effect on AG and IN. CL, MD, ID, and SB were all have positive effect on TI. (c) OS has positive effect on IS, IN, and TS. TU has positive effect on IS. (d) AG and IN have positive effects on US, OP, and MP. IS has positive effect on US and TI has positive effect on MP. Finally, UP also has positive effect on US and MP. Second, the effect of strategy on the characteristics of AIS and organization support. (a) The enterprises pursuing MD, ID, or SB strategy need more broad-scope and higher integration information than adopting CL strategy enterprise. (b) The enterprises pursuing CL, MD, or ID strategy need more timely information than adopting SB strategy enterprise. (c) The enterprises pursuing SB strategy need more aggregation information than adopting CL strategy enterprise. (d) The enterprises pursuing MD, ID, or SB strategy put more emphasis than adopting CL strategy enterprise on the UP and TS. Third, the effect of contingency factors. (a) When a company facing higher degree of EC and EU, more broad-scope information could effectively enhance user satisfaction, operation improvement and managerial performance. (b) When a company pursuing CL strategy, higher degree of aggregation information will improve operation procedure. When a company¡¦s goal was for marketing differential, more timely and integration information were needed and less aggregated information should be provided for a better performance of OP and MP. When a company was pursuing ID strategy, AIS should provide more timely information. When a company was pursuing SB strategy, more emphasis should be on aggregation and integration information. (c) When a company pursuing MD strategy, OS structure, or facing higher TU, the emphasis on UP will improve US and MP.

Accompanied by the enormous losses cause by the worldwide economic recession and Internet bubbles, venture capital industry at the same time is faced with another crucial problems: for a venture capital firm, what characteristics should a venture capitalist possess? How does these characteristics influence the behaviors of the venture capital firms and venture capitalists themselves? As everyone knows, venture capital firms differ significantly in business strategies and fund sources, thereby give rise to the difference of venture capital firms in selecting the characteristics of venture capitalists. Therefore, universal traits and characteristics of venture capitalists are difficult to find out. In the circumstances, venture capital firms must understand how venture capitalists characteristics may influence investment behaviors and strategies. By means of the analysis of the characteristics of venture capitalists and venture capital firms, this study tries to find out the important factors affecting the behaviors of venture capitalists. Through the empirical research towards the Taiwan venture capitalists, several findings are presented in this study. As finding shows, some characteristics of venture capital firms such as firm age have a great influence on the behaviors of venture capitalists. Moreover, from the insignificance of some factors examined in this study, we conclude that there are still some structural factors influencing the behaviors of venture capitalists.