The focus of this research is in the area of African American male superintendents and their leadership in diverse settings. The research approach adopted in this dissertation used semi-structured interviews with five African American male superintendents that consisted of three main issues: (1) personal; (2) leadership quality/effectiveness and (3) impact on student academic performance. The findings from this research provide evidence that: superintendents believed they gained their focus on education by having strong parental influences; each superintendent believed that their involvement in sports helped them to sharpen their leadership skills at an early age; they believed in having systems in place to monitor and track the performance of their district; being visible in the community has helped to garner support from all stakeholders; and being educated during the civil rights era taught the superintendents a lot about equity issues. The main conclusions drawn from this research were that superintendent efficacy, professional development and a goal toward academic success for all students were the components demonstrated by these district leaders. This research recommends that superintendents have professional development to strengthen strong people skills, create mentorships and shadow-mentoring programs for both African American male superintendent candidates and practicing African American male superintendents new to the job or new to their district, emphasize diversity in leadership, investigate superintendency preparation programs at the university level to address racial issues, and research studies should be more specific on the office of the superintendency.

The efficiency of human visual information processing is supported by numerous attentional resources. These resources ensure that behaviourally relevant information within visual scenes is selected for detailed processing, while behaviourally irrelevant information is ignored. One of these attentional resources—reflexive visuospatial attention—operates by prioritising locations in visual space in response to the appearance of salient stimuli. The purpose of the present dissertation was to examine how this type of attention contributes to the efficiency of visual processing by asking: How is processing altered for information presented at the location of attention? To develop some initial evidence of the stage of processing affected by reflexive visuospatial attention, Chapters 1 to 6 assessed whether this attentional resource is related to four other stimulus-driven effects that are each associated with a specific stage of visual processing: identity processing, object filtering, visual working memory (VWM), and response generation. Based on the observation that only the stimulus-driven effects on VWM are related to reflexive visuospatial attention (i.e., only those effects were contingent on attentional control settings), a VWM model of reflexive visuospatial attention was proposed in Chapter 7, and tested in Chapters 8 to 11. According to this model, reflexive visuospatial attention alters visual processing by triggering VWM to update. Thus, the effect of reflexive visuospatial attention is to speed the encoding of attended information into VWM. As a result, this information is more likely than unattended information to bias our behaviour, in particular those behaviours that depend on VWM. Further, by biasing VWM, reflexive visuospatial attention can interact with other attentional resources that have also been associated with VWM. In this way, these attentional resources can coordinate in optimising the process of selection, thus, contributing to the efficiency of the human visual system.

This study addresses the measurement of satisfaction. In doing so, it proposes a hypothetical conceptual framework for examining visitors’ satisfaction with their experiences in nature-based settings. Visitors’ overall satisfaction with their experiences was examined in terms of its relationships to visitors’ satisfaction with various site attributes, to visitors’ perceived importance of interpretive programs to learning, and how it is affected by visitors’ age, gender (male or female) and visitation pattern. The responses of 1309 Visitor Information Program (VIP) surveys returned by visitors to two national sites in Nova Scotia (Port Royal National Historic Site and Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site) provided the data for this study’s investigation. Secondary data analyses revealed that visitors’ satisfaction with the site attributes has the strongest effect on their overall satisfaction with their experiences. While visitors’ perceived importance to learning was also found to be positively correlated to overall experience satisfaction, when other variable are taken into consideration, its effect on overall satisfaction was found not to be statistically significant. Amongst these variables, gender was found to explain a significant amount of variance in visitors’ overall satisfaction with experiences in nature-based settings. Moreover, visitors of different age groups differ significantly in their perceptions of importance of interpretation to learning, and in their satisfaction levels. Although the findings show high levels of satisfaction at both sites, these are taken with caution. A discussion of the issues related to the measurement of satisfaction is provided, along with recommendations for a more discriminant, valid and reliable satisfaction measurement instrument.

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Alcohol is one of the most widely used recreational drugs in the United States today, despite being associated with a myriad of negative effects. Alcohol consumption occurs most frequently within social contexts, and seems to be strongly related to many social factors. It is known that an individual's expectations of the effects of alcohol influences his/her drinking behavior, and that social alcohol expectancies are some of the most frequently reported expectancies. In this study, we explored the relationship between alcohol expectancies and social influences by examining whether exposure to a social context would differentially activate alcohol expectancies. 115 young-adult male participants were exposed to either a social context or a control condition. Subsequently, participants' alcohol expectancies were assessed using both explicit and implicit measurements. Differences between conditions were found on the implicit expectancy measure (a free association task) but not on the explicit expectancy measures. Results from the free association task indicated that participants who were exposed to a social context were more likely to report positive and arousing words in response to the prompt "alcohol makes me _______". These differences suggest that exposure to a social context may not overtly change individuals' alcohol expectancies, but may increase the availability of positive and arousing alcohol expectancies. This increase in availability of positive and arousing expectancies may explain one of the mechanisms involved in deciding to engage in social drinking.

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You know that electronic device where you with just a simple click on a button can open a world of knowledge?  This device is the television, the most powerful weapon in the media world. But with all this power comes great responsibility. I am going to study a children program called Rea to see how equal the gender representation is. Who has got the power, men or women? Does the result reflect our society in representation? To do this I have been watching the entire 21:st season of Rea to find out how kids are represented in numbers and what role they play in the program based on their gender. Are the boys in charge and doing all the bold and brave tests and stunts? Are the girls quiet, sweet and nice as the stereotypical picture? Is it time to react and really see what media is trying to say with what they show us? If so, this analysis of Rea is a start.

Syftet med mitt arbete är att ta del av pedagogers erfarenheter av att arbeta med sinnligt lärande på en gymnasiesärskola. Hur skapar pedagogerna en kreativ lärmiljö för sina elever? Använder de sig av några sinnliga lärmetoder och i så fall hur? Min metod består bl.a. avdeltagande observationer och semistrukturerade intervjuer i en etnografisk studie. Analysen har visat att innebörden av ett framgångsrikt pedagogiskt arbete med dessa ungdomar på gymnasiesärskolan kan ses som en god praktik där fenomen som individuella mål, erfarenhet, intresse, delaktighet, sinnligt lärande, upplevelse, synliggörande samt att lära av varandra är centrala och viktiga delar. Min uppfattning är att pedagogerna försöker variera sina lärmiljöer och använder sig av sinnliga lärmetoder i undervisningen. Hela läsårets löpande arbete läggs upp i olika tema-moduler där undervisningen sker både inne och ute i natur och kulturlandskap. För vidare forskning kan det vara intressant att ta reda på om lärdomar från en lärmiljö kan överföras till en annan lärmiljö, och om ungdomarnas sociala erfarenheter och lärande i sinnliga rum blir överfört till vardagen hemma eller till skolarbetet generellt. / The subject of my paper is to examine the experiences of teachers using a multi-sensory teaching approach when working with pupils with learning disabilities in upper secondary school. How can they create a creative learning environment for their students? Do they use any multisensory teaching methods and, if so, how? My methodology has mainly consisted in participating observation and semi-structured interviews in an ethnographic study. Analysis has shown that the significance of a successful educational effort with these young people at upper secondary school can be seen as a good practice, in which phenomena such as individual objectives, experience, interest, participation, multi-sensory learning, experiential learning, visualization and learning from each other, are central and essential elements. My view is that the teachers try to vary their learning environments and that they are using different multi-sensory teaching methods. All the day-to-day schoolwork is set-up in different theme modules, where teaching takes place both indoors and outdoors in wilderness and cultivated landscapes. For further research, it might be interesting to find out if the lessons learned from one learning environment can be transferred to another, and if the social experiences and lessons learned in multi-sensory environments will be transferred to the young people’s everyday home life or to their schoolwork, in general.

What social practices are people involved when staying in a game café? What kind of social setting is the game café? What are the attitudes towards playing computer games at home and in public among parents? What are the media representations of co-located game playing in public? What are the sensory experiences of playing co-located game play in public? This dissertation gives a descriptive and analytical account of the contexts and meanings of playing co-located computer games in public settings such as game cafés and LAN parties. The overall aim with the dissertation is to describe and investigate the social and cultural meanings and contexts of playing computer games in a game café. The research questions have been investigated in four empirical studies. The dissertation shows that people are involved in various social practices and activities aimed at supporting and maintaining social relationships among friends and peers. The game café can be seen as a third place, as it used by players for recreation and an escape from the pressure of home and school, a place which feels like home, is familiar and welcoming. However the game café is a limited third place used by young men who likes to play online and network games. The dissertation also shows how the social environment provides for specific sensory experiences. These sensory experiences involve sitting together side by side slapping each other’s shoulders and legs, eating candies and drinking sodas, listening to music. The representations of co-located game playing in public reproduce traditional gender roles where professional gamers are represented by men and causal gamers are represented by women (and men) as well as construct youth as party lovers. The study also suggests that parents’ attitudes towards their children playing games in public draw on traditional values and ideas about children’s play and social relationships. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 4: Submitted. </p>