There is no abstract available for this dissertation. / Department of Educational Psychology

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 332-347).

No description available.

No description available.

Using Roberts’ seven science curriculum emphases as a framework, an investigation into Alberta’s physics program-of-study revealed pre-service, novice, and experienced teachers tended to focus on the emphasis Structure of Science. Other aspects of the program-of-study that was a high priority for teachers were the ideas of the holistic views of physics and student engagement which both fell beyond Roberts’ framework. Comparing the focus of the teacher participants to the curriculum leader, interpreted by the researcher to be a representative of the Curriculum Branch of Alberta Education, it was noted that the areas of weak overlap between the teacher participants and the curriculum leader were the ideas of Structure of Science and student engagement. However, the curriculum leader tended to focus more on Self as Explainer and Science, Technology, and Decision.

The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1985. / Includes index. Includes bibliographical references (p. 295-301).

The purpose of this study was to examine differences in the effectiveness of two graduate teacher education programs in reading assessment, one group using the Reading Miscue Inventory and the other using one of its simplified forms, the Reading Appraisal Guide. The main question that is answered in this study is whether it is more effective for teachers to be given training in the Reading Miscue Inventory, or is training in the Reading Appraisal Guide sufficient to enable teachers to carry out competent assessments of children's reading ability? In the six months of the study's duration, different types of data were collected. These consisted of assessments of children's taped readings of a story by two groups of teachers before (the pretest) and after (the posttest) their respective training programs; anecdotal records of the teachers' views of the programs and the assessment instruments they were using, and observations of the teachers' reading assessments of children selected by them for their practicum. Quantitative analyses of the pretest and posttest were made; these were based on criteria drawn from the Reading Miscue Inventory manual and the investigator's own miscue analysis of the children's taped readings. They showed that the teachers trained in miscue analysis, as reflected in the Reading Miscue Inventory, were able to make significantly better assessments of children's reading ability than the teachers trained in the Reading Appraisal Guide. In addition to the quantitative analysis, written and oral statements made by the teachers during the pretest, posttest and training programs were subjected to qualitative analysis and comparisons. These indicated that both groups' programs had strengthened the teachers' adherence to the Goodman model of reading, but those trained in the use of the Reading Miscue Inventory developed more effective assessment abilities and were more approving of the instruments they used, than were those trained in the use of the Reading Appraisal Guide. It was concluded that the Reading Miscue Inventory is an appropriate assessment instrument for use in college graduate reading programs. It proved complex and time-consuming to use, but at the same time it enabled teachers to make more accurate, in-depth assessments of children's reading than did the Reading Appraisal Guide. The latter was found to have some serious drawbacks, mostly arising from attempts to make it quicker and easier to use.

This study compares the behavior of differential equations and difference equations of various orders in order to predict the state of the systems at a given time by using initial information about the system. We have demonstrated that differential equations are used in a continuous domain whereas difference equations are employed for discrete dynamical systems. Furthermore, the difference between the two models is amplified in logistic models which both are known to give explicit solutions. However, the discrete logistic model is especially superior in exhibiting a chaotic behavior of the system which the differential equation is incapable of dealing with. The conclusions drawn from the findings conform the similarities and the stark differences between these two models.