Thesis (Ph. D.)--Texas State University-San Marcos, 2006. / Vita. Appendices: leaves 102-107. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 108-120).

In the present study, three self-managed treatment programs were compared with respect to their ability to effect and maintain change in the cigarette smoking behavior of 27 subject volunteers from the population of employees of a Veterans Administration hospital. Subjects were randomly assigned to a self—imposed delay group, a self-directed relaxation group, and a self-monitoring group. The experimental program lasted 6 weeks with a 20-minute individual meeting each week. Three months following treatment, subjects were contacted by mail and were asked to monitor their smoking behavior for one week, and to return their average daily smoking rate by mail. The results provide support for the effectiveness of the self-management technique of self-imposed delay as a durability—enhancing treatment procedure. The effectiveness of self-management techniques as a general class of treatment strategies was not supported. A task for future research would be to establish the effectiveness of the delay technique implemented earlier in the cigarette smoking chain, as well as to determine whether effectiveness is increased or decreased by a specification of the content of a delay interval.

This study identified and defined leader behaviors with two levels of leadership in a self-managed team organization. Job analysis methodology was used. A comparison of task importance values was made within groups and between hierarchical levels in the organization. Identified leader behaviors were compared with effective, traditional leader performance. Qualitative data collected throughout the investigation clarified an integrative model for effective organizations developed from the literature. The model included leader characteristics and team member behaviors when using self-managed teams.

Background: The most commonly reported side effects experienced by breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy are fatigue, anxiety and depression. Alongside psychosocial difficulties, evidence suggests chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer is associated with perceived cognitive impairment and that which is objectively detected in domains of memory, attention, concentration and executive function. As these concerns are becoming more prominent, research has shifted towards managing these side effects and helping to improve overall quality of life and well-being of breast cancer patients and survivors. To our knowledge, intervention studies have not yet considered physical activity as a potential for maintaining cognitive difficulties in breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Physical activity interventions are reported to be effective in alleviating emotional distress and fatigue in those with breast cancer. It has also been reported to improve cognitive functioning in the elderly, in those suffering with dementia and in children. It is proposed that physical activity could also help to manage cognitive impairment in female breast cancer patients and improve levels of psychosocial functioning. The aim of this PhD research was to implement a home-based, self-managed, physical activity intervention to alleviate cognitive and psychosocial difficulties experienced by female breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. The intervention was designed using goal setting techniques enabling patients to self-manage their walking schedules and minimise input from NHS staff. Method: The randomised controlled trial compared a home-based, self-managed walking intervention to usual care alone among breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy. Fifty participants were randomised to either the intervention group (n=25), receiving 12 weeks of moderate intensity walking, or the control group (n=25) mid-way through chemotherapy. Participants in the intervention group were provided with a pedometer and were asked to set goals and keep weekly diaries outlining the duration, intensity and exertion of their walking. Levels of psychosocial and cognitive functioning were assessed pre and post intervention in both groups. Primary outcome measures for this intervention were changes in cognitive functioning. Four domains of cognitive functioning were assessed using neuropsychological tests and subjective functioning was measured using The Cognitive Failures Questionnaire. Secondary outcome measures were on psychosocial functioning. Results: The self-managed intervention had positive effects on fatigue, self-esteem, mood, levels of physical activity and stage of motivational readiness but not anxiety and depression. Positive benefits of walking were also detected in perceived cognitive function but not in sustained attention, executive function, memory and visual spatial skills when assessed objectively. Qualitative data indicated that the self-managed intervention was feasible, adhered to and received positively during active chemotherapy. Conclusion: The home-based self-managed intervention was beneficial for improving psychosocial well-being and maintaining perceived cognitive functioning among breast cancer patients treated with chemotherapy.

This dissertation research focuses on investigating the incidence of student self-regulated learning behavior, and examines patterns in student affective states that accompany such self-regulated behavior. This dissertation leverages prediction models of student affective states in the Physics Playground educational game platform to identify common patterns in student affective states during use of self-regulated learning behavior. In Study 1, prediction models of student affective states are developed in the context of the educational game environment Physics Playground, using affective state observations and computer log data that had already been collected as part of a larger project. The performances of student affective state prediction models generated using a combination of the computer log and observational data are then compared against those of similar prediction models generated using video data collected at the same time. In Study 2, I apply these affective state prediction models to generate predictions of student affective states on a broader set of data collected from students participants playing Physics Playground. In parallel, I define aggregated behavioral features that represent the self-observation and strategic planning components of self-regulated learning. Affective state predictions are then mapped to playground level attempts that contain these self-regulated learning behavioral features, and sequential pattern mining is applied to the affective state predictions to identify the most common patterns in student emotions. Findings from Study 1 demonstrate that both video data and interaction log data can be used to predict student affective states with significant accuracy. Since the video data is a direct measure of student emotions, it shows better performance across most affective states. However, the interaction log data can be collected natively by Physics Playground and is able to be generalized more easily to other learning environments. Findings from Study 2 suggest that self-regulatory behavior is closely associated with sustained periods of engaged concentration and .self-regulated learning behaviors are associated with transitions from negative affective states (confusion, frustration, and boredom) to the positive engaged concentration state. The results of this dissertation project demonstrate the power of measuring student affective states in real time and examining the temporal relationship to self-regulated learning behavior within an unstructured educational game platform. These results thus provide a building block for future research on the real-time assessment of student emotions and its relationship with self-regulated learning behaviors, particularly within online student-centered and self-directed learning contexts.

Web services composition is emerging as a promising technology for the effective automation of application-to-application collaborations. The application integration problems have been subject of much research in the past years. However, with growth in importance of business process automation and highly dynamic nature of the Internet, this research has taken on a new significance and importance. Adequate solutions to this problem will be very important to make enterprise systems more flexible, robust and usable in the future. In this dissertation, we present a novel approach for the declarative definition and scalable orchestration of composite Web services in large, autonomous, heterogeneous, and dynamic environments. We first propose a composition model for composing Web services in a personalized and adaptive manner. We model composite Web services based on statecharts. To cater for large amounts of dynamic Web services, we use the concept of service community that groups services together and is responsible for the runtime selection of services against user's preferences. We use the concept of process schema that specific users can adjust with their personal preferences. A set of exception handling policies can be specified to proactively react to runtime exceptions. We then propose a tuple space based service orchestration model for distributed, self-managed composite services execution. We introduce the concept of execution controller that is associated with a service and is responsible for monitoring and controlling service executions. The knowledge required by a controller is statically extracted from the specification of personalized composite services. We also present techniques for robust Web services provisioning. The techniques presented in this dissertation are implemented in Self-Serv, a prototype that provides a set of tools for Web service composition and execution. Finally, we conduct an extensive usability and performance study of the proposed techniques. The experimental results reveal that our system i) provides an efficient support for specifying, deploying, and accessing composite services; ii) is more scalable and outperforms the centralized approach when the exchanged messages become bigger; and iii) is more robust and adaptive in highly dynamic environments.

"Substitutes for leadership" is a new emerging leadership model of organizations within turbulent environments. Employee might minimize the "need for leadership" by "shared values", "self-managed work teams" and "cynicism". These substitutes would have further direct impacts on job outcomes as well. This study suggests that the higher the extent of shared values, self-managed work teams or cynicism, the lower the extent of the need for leadership. Also except cynicism, the higher the extent of shared values or self-managed work teams, the higher the extent of job outcomes. Data used were collected in two Kaohsiung companies, including an insurance agent and a semiconductor company. After statistic analyzes the results are stated as bellow: ¢¹. Differences of all variables due to characteristics of individuals. 1. The insurance agent: Employee are graduated from senior high schools have the higher extents of job outcomes than those are graduated from colleges. Sales have the higher extent of shared values, self-managed work teams and job outcomes, and the lower extent of cynicism than clerks. 2. The semiconductor company: No characteristics of individuals make a difference of variables. ¢º. Relationships between substitutes and the need for leadership. 1. The insurance agent: The higher the extent of shared values the higher the extent of the need for leadership. The higher the extent of self-managed work teams the higher the extent of the need for leadership. The higher the extent of cynicism the higher the extent of the need for leadership. 2. The semiconductor company: The same as the above. ¢». Relationships between substitutes and job outcomes. 1. The insurance agent: The higher the extent of shared values, the higher the extent of job outcomes; the higher the extent of self-managed work teams, the higher the extent of job outcomes; the lower the extent of cynicism, the higher the extent of job outcomes. 2. The semiconductor company: The same as the above. The empirical results show that although the substitutes regression model can offer explanation of job outcomes, the higher extents of shared values and self-managed work teams do not lead to the lower extent of the need for leadership. The reason that hypotheses are not approved seems to be the sampling. The insurance agent is an organization of the tight leader-follower relationship; the subordinators of the newly established semiconductor company of course strongly depend on the experienced leaders. Or shared values and self-managed work teams would not be the substitutes for leadership in deed. Or leadership could not be replaced at all!

Doing a bachelor’s or master’s degree is a journey that leads to success or attrition (dropout). Previous research show to the significance of considering learners’ perspectives and their need for information and different types of interaction. This can be done through online ICTSS (information and communication technology support systems). The overall aim of this dissertation was to create knowledge about how the use of ICTSS can facilitate different types of interaction and support learners in order to reduce thesis problems and attrition and to enhance the quality of the thesis outcomes. The aim was operationalized by two research questions scrutinizing the interaction problems in the thesis process and investigating how the use of ICTSS can facilitate different types of interaction to reduce such problems and attrition, and to enhance the learning opportunities and quality of the thesis outcomes. To answer the research questions, five main studies were performed by applying different research methods on a case study. The empirical studies were performed at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University, Sweden. The respondents were different learners (students) with active thesis projects at the bachelor or master level in different programs at DSV between 2012 and 2015. For the first two studies, conceptual and content analysis of the data collected from the case study was performed. For the three other studies, open-ended online questionnaires (survey) and interviews were conducted. On the basis of the findings, three main types of interaction issues were developed which related to the need for more learner-content, peer-to-peer, and learner-supervisor interaction in the thesis process. The hypothesis was that the interaction issues could be reduced by implementing a set of strategic suggestions through the use of an ICTSS including a set of functionalities and resources. The usefulness of these functionalities and resources was evaluated with regard to the learners’ perception and experiences. The findings were categorized to facilitate learner-content, peer-to-peer, and learner-supervisor interaction, as well as management of the contents, supervision, and communication of the supervisory team. From these categories, a conceptual framework was developed in this dissertation to illustrate how the use of the ICTSS supports the thesis process. In conclusion, providing access to a set of structured e-resources and supporting educational communication through different types of interaction with peers and the supervisory team, enables learners’ self-managed learning and facilitates similar learning opportunities for learners in thesis courses.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Texas State University--San Marcos, 2009. / Vita. Appendix: leaf 111. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-121). Also available on microfilm.

This study investigates the effects of a participative-type management approach termed self-managed work teams (SMWTs) and work spillover into the family environment. The perspective of isomorphism by Aldous (1969), and Rapoport and Rapoport (1965), was used as a paradigm to examine both positive and negative effects of the work-family relationship. A total of 76 employees from the Department of Defense's Quality Division was used in the regression analysis, due to recent transitions into SMWTs. Results reported overwhelming support for the perspective of isomorphism: over 40% of the variation in positive work spillover was explained by SWMT characteristics. Communication with other teams was the single most important factor found to have a significant effect on positive work spillover.