A cooperation project on school physical education (PE) was established between the Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria, South Africa and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The project was funded as part of the international cooperation agreement between South Africa and Sweden. The aim of the project was to investigate discrepancies between intended subscription and actual provision for PE/Life Orientation (LO) in Swedish and South African schools. Presented in this paper are results of the pilot study on the comparative research project which focused on PE as a tool for developing health and social skills among Swedish and South African school children. A major objective of the project was to investigate how provision for PE is defined in formal school settings in both countries. To answer the question we constructed a 23-item questionnaire measuring PE provision and children’s attitudes towards the subject in primary and lower secondary schools. A questionnaire was constructed utilizing a) participant observations of lessons in Sweden and South Africa, b) semi-structured interviews with school principals and PE teachers in both countries, and c) analyses of policy documents in each country. The pilot instrument consisted of four batteries of questions: a) Health promotion (8 items), b) Social development (8 items), c) Personal development (10 items), and d) Physical development and movement (6 items). The questionnaire was developed in two almost identical versions and was completed by primary school pupils in South Africa (n =105) and Sweden (n = 42). In order to improve the reliability and the construct validity of the questionnaire we modified the pilot versions of the questionnaire eliminating poorly fit items using various statistical techniques. Pupils’ answers to the questionnaire were analyzed mainly through structural equation modeling techniques (AMOS). This technique facilitates the simultaneous analysis of the robustness of the whole instrument and the test of each battery of questions. The statistical analyses were aimed at designing a questionnaire with very good fit indices for Swedish and South African contexts. Results yielded substantial Cronbach’s α: whole instrument (α=.84); Health promotion (α=60), Social development (α=60), Personal development (α=79), Physical development (α=76), which showed acceptable reliability estimates for the questionnaire subscales.

On-the-job training, the inculcation and development of skills of employees at the workplace, is a sine qua non for increased productivity and morale. These latter attendant attributes are the bedrock of the broader human resource management strategy, to enable municipalities to improve governance systems. The government has created an enabling environment through the enactment of legislations such as the Skills Development Act, 1998 (Act 97 of 1998) and the White Paper on Public Service Training and Education (Notice 422 of 1997) amongst others, to ensure that municipalities are able to realise this mandate. The ultimate objective is to establish a clear vision and policy framework to guide the introduction and implementation of new policies, procedures and legislation aimed at transforming public service training and education into a dynamic, needs-based and pro-active instrument. Against this background, the role of the training department of the municipality becomes central in enabling the council to counteract employee poor performance levels and poor service delivery by the municipality. This article employs the case study approach at the Emfuleni Local Municipality (ELM), as well as literature review on training and postulates that sustainable human resource management in public service institutions and the ELM in particular, are inextricably linked with the capacity of the municipality to provide on-the-job training to its employees. This is a basic requirement to enable a municipality to provide effective and efficient service delivery.

It was proposed that student mathematics gain scores on the Georgia Criteria Referenced Competency Test (CRCT], motivation ant1 teacher expectation might be explained by teacher perceptions of the selected independent variables: Instructional I leadership, professional development, teacher methodology, achievement lesson planning, teacher instructional delivery and teacher college preparation. The correlation design did not include a control group. Thirty-seven of the 48 teachers responded to a 51 -item, five-point ordinal scale questionnaire in a metropolitan Atlanta elementary school. Significant correlations were student CRCT performance; motivation and teacher expectations were intercorrelated and all three variables were significantly correlated with the Achievement Lesson Planning system (ALPS), college preparation, instructional supervision, math grouping, and staff professional development. Higher order thinking skills (HOTS) were only significantly related to CRCT and teacher expectation. Based on these results. five third grade teachers were selected for treatment, and were asked to rate their 95 students' ability to respond to higher order thinking skills in addition to providing teacher and student demographic information. Based on the results of both surveys, a treatment was conducted to counteract the identified causal variables for low student responsiveness in teaching of higher order thinking skills in order to improve student mathematic performance. The researcher (the principal) trained the third grade teachers to function as a Grade Achievement 1em (GAT) on the Empowerment Management of meeting (EMOM) model and to utilize the ALPS to plan lessons so as to counteract the causal variables for low student performance and to teach for higher order thinking skills utilizing the Observation Based Instructional Assessment System (OBIA). The results of ANOVA indicated that all teachers made significant gains on the teaching of HOTS in mathematics. In a factor analysis, HOTS gain scores in mathematics were loaded in component I inversely only with teacher gender. The results of regression analysis indicated that student CRCT math performance was significantly predicted only by their Pre-CRCT score and teacher rating of their math performance. It was suggested that the principal provided professional development at the Grade Achievement Team (GAT) level in the Management of Meeting (EMOM) model for conducting Achievement Lesson Planning System (ALPS) and Observation Based Instructional Assessment (OBIA) on the teaching of higher order thinking skills (HOTS).

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The aim of this thesis is to investigate the acquisition of different elements of process control skills and how the transfer between task elements contributes to the acquisition of the overall task. Process control tasks are very complex cognitive tasks consisting of a number of subordinate task elements such as procedure-following, diagnosis, & monitoring, whose execution must be planned carefully in order to meet the system goal. In the past, research emphasis has focused upon training these subordinate tasks separately, ignoring the possibility that performance at one element would benefit from or interfere with mastery of another. Understanding these possible 'internal transfer' phenomena will influence training design. It would also influence issues of work design, including allocation of functions, since tasks designed to enable practice of the constituent elements to support each other would counterbalance problems associated with infrequent use of skills in automated plants. This thesis has focused upon the development of training methods to optimise transfer of knowledge and skills, assisting trainees to integrate different task elements within the overall process control task they need to master. The transfer of training literature was reviewed in order to identify major variables influencing transfer. To provide a framework for utilising previous empirical findings in examining transfer of complex process control skills, a model of Hierarchical Task Analysis was developed which described the task in terms of a limited number of operations and plans. A major hypothesis put forward in the thesis is that 'task elements with similar forms of plans and operations may prompt an individual to adopt similar cognitive processes and transfer will be observed'. The size of transfer, however, would be determined by the learning conditions under which the original task elements were acquired. To examine the influence of learning conditions upon transfer of task elements, four training methods were developed based upon a theoretical model of transfer which was integrated with the hierarchical task analysis. A large scale experiment was conducted in order to investigate the effects of the four training methods upon learning two similar tasks, in the context of starting-up a distillation column. This task was simulated in a microcomputer. The two tasks were designed to share common task elements but were different in terms of the required product specifications. Twenty-eight postgraduate students took part in a training course which lasted for eight hours approximately. The subjects were assigned to the following four experimental conditions: (i) the procedures-group which was provided with efficient procedures; (ii) the analysis-group which received additional explanations about the interaction of goals described in the procedures; (iii) the model-group which was provided with a structural model of the plant, but with no procedures; and (iv) the practice-group which learned the tasks by practice and which was used as a control condition. The model of learning was used to make transfer predictions and generate five experimental hypotheses which were tested in the main study; one hypothesis was concerned with the acquisition of the original task, two of them with the transfer of task elements and the other two with nonspecific transfer effects. For a number of performance measures such as speed, control performance and economy of operation, the procedures- and analysis- groups performed the original task better than the other groups. The model-group was faster than the practice-group; however, their control and economy aspects of performance were equivalent. An 'in-depth' analysis of the control actions and verbal protocols showed that the model-group continued to experiment with' the process, putting into practice the theory of plant which was taught to them. Performance at the transfer task indicated that all groups performed better than the practice-group, which provides support for the hypothesis that 'task elements similar in form may prompt an individual to adopt similar cognitive processes and transfer may occur'. However, the procedures-group degraded its performance and appeared to be inferior to both the analysis- and modelgroups, which may indicate that some kind of extrinsic information in the form of planning or conceptual knowledge would be required to optimise transfer. On the other hand, the analysis-group was faster than the model-group, but no significant differences were reported with respect to other measures of performance. On practice with a successive transfer task of the same kind, the observed patterns of performance changed. Only the analysis-group was significantly better than the practice-group, the other groups having scored in between these two groups. This finding has highlighted the role of practice in an interactive learning environment provided by the plant simulator. Although the experimental design attempted to control for nonspecific transfer effects by maximising the number of 'common' task elements between the original and transfer tasks, the individual differences observed and the changes in the kind of plans developed by trainees have indicated that such transfer effects have actually taken place. This was expected to occur to a certain extent, and two hypotheses had been formulated in order to examine this issue by looking into the types of planning and conceptual knowledge which supported transfer. As it was expected, the analysis- and model- groups achieved higher nonspecific transfer scores than the other groups which were measured in terms of the amount of disturbance caused to previously established parameters and the number of questions answered in a questionnaire administered in the end of the study. An interesting result, however, was that the practice-group appeared to be better than the procedures-group in this respect; this may be accounted for by the fact that the former group was more actively engaged in learning the original task. Finally, the thesis has investigated the transfer of the three subordinate goals common to both the original and transfer tasks. An important factor which has influenced the different degrees at which these goals were transferred was the degree of flexibility entailed in their performance. The thesis concludes with an evaluation of its own approach and suggestions for future research.

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Note: / Social skills instruction is a key component to intervening with students with emotionaland behavioral disorders (EBD). The behavior of students in the elementary school levels shouldbe assessed in order to implement behavioral intervention strategies because as they progressinto high school and later, the risk for negative life-long impact increases. The two main goalsare perceived by their friends, siblings, parents, and teachers, and to allow them to generalize theskills that they learn, being able to use the positive social skills outside of the training setting. Inorder to do so, it is crucial to assess students' behavior, to train students through directinstruction, teacher modeling, student role play, and skill review, and to allow students toevaluate themselves on their proficiency of using the newly learned skill. In the project thatfollows, a review of literature justifying social skills instruction as a valid intervention method,as well as a proposed social skills curriculum, are presented.

This study investigated whether or not receiving cognitive modification counseling would lead to reduced debilitating test anxiety, as measured by the Achievement Anxiety Test (AAT), and improved standardized test performance, as measured by the School and College Abilities Test (SCAT). The subjects were test anxious college students of high, middle, and low ability levels. It was predicted that test anxious students who received cognitive modification counseling would experience greater reductions in test anxiety than would test anxious students who did not receive such counseling. It was further predicted that concomitant with test anxiety reduction, students of middle ability would demonstrate greater improvement on a standardized aptitude test than would students of high or low ability who had received counseling or students of high, middle, or low aptitude who had not received counseling.SCAT and AAT pre-tests were administered to 776 college undergraduates, the majority of whom were freshmen. Students were designated as being of high, middle, or low ability level on the basis of their SCAT standard scores. Those students who scored within the highest 27% on the AAT were invited to participate in counseling and volunteers were randomly assigned to experimental and wait-list control groups. A total of 68 volunteer subjects' participated in the study.Experimental subjects were randomly assigned, within the limitations of their time schedules, to three counseling groups of 9-14 subjects per group. The author acted as counselor for all groups, which each met for five sessions over a period of three weeks. Meichenbaum's (1972) cognitive modification procedures were followed in all sessions.Experimental and wait-list control groups were post-tested with the AAT and an. alternate form of the SCAT. A two factor multivariate analysis of covariance design was used to analyze the data. The independent variable was counseling and no-counseling. AAT and SCAT post-test scores were the dependent variables measured, with SCAT pre-test scores serving as the covariate.Analysis of the data revealed that debilitating test anxiety was significantly (p.< .01) reduced for subjects who received cognitive modification counseling. Performance scores on the SCAT post-test, however, were the same for both counseled and wait-list control subjects. Analysis of the interaction between treatement and ability level also revealed no significant differences. Standardized test scores were essentially the same, within ability levels, for counseled and wait-list control subjects.The findings of this study support the effectiveness of cognitive modification counseling as a technique for reducing test anxiety among college students. They do not, however, support the contention that test anxiety has a detrimental effect on standardized test performance or the differential effects, reported in previous studies, of test anxiety on learning and test performance among students of high, average, and low ability. Methodological limitations encountered in the study, however, make hazardous the arrival at conclusions regarding the effect of test anxiety on test performance.The results of this study indicate that counselors may need to consider combining instruction in study techniques with cognitive modification counseling when attempting to bring about improved test performance among test anxious college students. The results also suggest that school psychologists may accept with confidence the group standardized test scores of students who report themselves to be test anxious.Recommendations for further research concerning the interactive effects of test anxiety and ability level on standardized test performance include: the use of an actual standardized test situation, i.e., a regularly scheduled administration of the Scholastic Aptitude Test; and comparison between group and individual standardized test scores of test anxious students.