Student Number : 0106532X - PhD thesis - School of Education - Faculty of Humanities / Managerialism and collegiality are employed in this thesis as constructs through which to make sense of the changing nature of management in a South African university. The rise and dominance of the managerialism discourse is examined with respect to organisational change and restructuring. As principally a qualitative research project, a single case study of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) is investigated using interviews, documentary analysis and focus group discussions as the main sources of data from 2001 to 2004. The study is exploratory and strives to establish how and why management has changed. It does so by investigating the underpinning changes in the organisational regime and the different levels of management; the role of the Senior Executive Team, the changing nature of the deanship and the head of school position as a consequence of the merger of departments and the creation of a school structure. Although management in higher education is recognised as having existed for as long as the establishments themselves, the thesis is concerned with the changes in power and authority of academic leaders, the struggle with their ‘lived’ tension between academic leadership or collegiality and managerialism and the implications of this for academic practice. The thesis illustrates that changes in management at Wits demonstrate efforts towards an era of post-managerialism, in this specific case best described as ‘contrived collegial managerialism’. The concept of ‘contrived collegial managerialism’ refers to how the domination of managerial practices from above has altered collegial relations from below. This has resulted in the weakening of academic leadership with profound implications for academic work and practice. Only through strengthened academic leadership at the different levels of university management and primarily school and disciplinary levels, can the university survive the indignities of the increasing corporatisation of its strategies, processes and management practices which constrain the opportunities for meaningful engagement and development of intellectual projects. It is only at disciplinary level, through strengthening the position of heads of department as academic leaders, that collegial relations can be developed and pressure towards upward accountability structures counteracted. Without this, the university risks being consumed by corporate practices at the expense of its unique quality and contribution to society, academic and intellectual advancement.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:30:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 6382.pdf: 5681895 bytes, checksum: 392cae29d834b75a278e647e0ce77447 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-10-17 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / The individualized teaching program for elemental reading and writing skills Learning to Read and Write in Small Steps has been systematically developed and improved for the last 25 years. Anecdotal observations suggested a reduction on the engagement of children in the program, indicating need to study motivational‟ variables in this context. The purpose of the present study was to analyze learning and task engagement of children during the application of Module 1 of the Program: 1) in its standard version (Standard-Procedure) and 2) in a token version, where points were added to a counter in correct trials exchanged for video access as supplementary consequences (Token- Procedure). Two experiments were conducted in an elementary public school with 21 children without or with incipient reading repertoire. In the Experiment 1, participants were nine boys and four girls with 8-10 years of age of the 3rd and 4th grade. Some participants were exposed to Standard-Procedure and others to Token-Procedure. Learning measures provided by the program and systematic observational measures (ten seconds partial interval recording) assessed performance. On-Task and Off-Task behaviors (participants‟) and Task Assistance and On-Task Request behaviors (experimenter‟s) were recorded in five sessions per participant. Results showed that all participants had meaningful gains in reading, spelling and equivalence performance, with teaching and recombination words, and the advancement in the procedure occurred within a number of sessions similarly to programmed teaching steps. An overall reduction trend of average latency to perform task along units was observed. The average latency in Token-Procedure was significantly lower than in Standard- Procedure. More promptness to perform task was interpreted as evidence of its greater evocative effectiveness, probably due its correlation with a more effective consequence. It suggests that the effects of standard consequences were supplemented by the introduction of points. All participants systematically engaged in the task during the teaching sessions and Off-Task behaviors occurred more variably and apparently without interfering in task performance, except in some cases. Off-task behaviors appeared to be mostly an artifact of the discrete-trial procedure, in which the task cannot occur continuously. The results of Experiment 1 led to Experiment 2, in which the parameters of point accumulation and of its exchange were adjusted (Token‟- Procedure). Participants were six boys and two girls, with 6-9 years, of 2nd or 3rd grade, with lower initial repertoire and were only partially exposed to Token‟- Procedure. Their performance differ significantly in relation to other participants, such as a higher number of repetitions of teaching steps and less gains of target repertoires, which impaired the observation of possible effects of Token‟-Procedure. Despite of the limitations of this study, its results indicate important directions for future studies on the determinants of task engagement of children in this Program. / O programa de ensino individualizado Aprendendo a Ler e a Escrever em Pequenos Passos vem sendo sistematicamente desenvolvido e aprimorado ao longo de 25 anos. Observações anedóticas sugeriram uma redução do engajamento de crianças, apontando-se a necessidade de se investigar aspectos motivacionais desse contexto. O presente estudo teve como objetivo analisar a aprendizagem e o engajamento de crianças durante a aplicação do Módulo 1 do Programa de Leitura: 1) em sua versão padrão (Procedimento-Padrão) e 2) em uma versão com a produção de pontos trocados por acesso a vídeos como consequência suplementar às consequências de acerto padrão (Procedimento-Ponto ou Ponto‟). Foram conduzidos dois experimentos em uma escola municipal de ensino fundamental com 21 crianças com repertório ausente ou incipientes em leitura. Participaram do Experimento 1 nove meninos e quatro meninas com 8 a 10 anos, do 3º ou 4 ano. Um conjunto de participantes foi exposto ao Procedimento-Padrão e outro conjunto ao Procedimento-Ponto. Analisou-se o desempenho com medidas de aprendizagem fornecidas pelo programa e medidas de observação sistemáticas (registro parcial a intervalos de dez segundos). Foram registrados comportamentos dos participantes de Executar Tarefa e Dispersar-se da Tarefa e comportamentos da Experimentadora de Auxiliar Tarefa e Solicitar Execução da Tarefa em cinco sessões de ensino por participante. Os resultados mostraram que todos os participantes obtiveram ganhos significativos em leitura, ditado e equivalência, com palavras de ensino e palavras novas e que o avanço no procedimento ocorreu em uma quantidade de sessões próxima ao número de passos de ensino programados. Observou-se uma tendência geral à redução da latência média para a execução da tarefa ao longo das unidades. A latência média apresentada no Procedimento-Ponto foi significativamente inferior àquela no Procedimento-Padrão. A maior prontidão na tarefa no Procedimento-Ponto foi interpretada como uma evidencia de sua maior efetividade evocativa, provavelmente decorrente de sua correlação com uma consequência mais eficaz. Isso sugere indícios de que o efeito de consequências padrão foi suplementado pela introdução de pontos. Todos os participantes engajaram-se sistematicamente na tarefa durante as sessões de ensino observadas e comportamentos chamados de dispersão ocorreram de maneira variável e, aparentemente, sem interferir no fluxo de execução da tarefa, exceto em alguns casos. Comportamentos de dispersão pareceram ser, em sua maioria, um artefato do procedimento por tentativas discretas, no qual a execução da tarefa não pode ocorrer continuamente. Os resultados do Experimento 1 levaram à condução do Experimento 2, no qual os parâmetros de acúmulo e troca de pontos foram ajustados (Procedimento- Ponto‟). Participaram seis meninos e duas meninas, com 6 a 9 anos, do 2º ou 3º ano, os quais apresentavam repertórios de entrada mais reduzidos do que os participantes do Experimento 1 e, além disso, foram expostos a apenas uma parte do procedimento. Isso gerou diferenças importantes entre seus desempenhos em relação aos demais participantes, como um número muito elevado de repetições de passos de ensino e a obtenção ganhos menos expressivos dos repertórios-alvo, o que interferiu na observação de possíveis efeitos do Procedimento-Ponto‟. Apesar das limitações do presente estudo, seus resultados sugerem diretivas importantes para a condução de novos estudos sobre os determinantes do engajamento de crianças no Programa de Leitura.

The rising rate of the autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has resulted in challenges for teachers in public schools, concerning the delivery of evidence-based practices for superior outcomes. Thus, school districts are in need of professional learning options that can be efficiently and effectively delivered to improve the procedural fidelity of interventions. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the effectiveness of using telepractice to teach autism teachers how to contrive motivating operations to teach manding to students with ASD. By utilizing multiple baselines across participants design, four autism teachers in public schools received intervention support through an online module along with video models as well as direct performance feedback from autism specialists via video-conferencing. The primary dependent variable was the percentage of correct responses from the instructional procedures of task analysis, and the secondary measure was the subsequent rate of student mands. Data were analyzed both visually (i.e., through the study of behavioral patterns) and statistically (i.e., analysis of effect size). Results indicate that telepractice increased accuracy of both teacher and student target responses.