Drug courts use sanctions as a form of behavior management and modification, and they are an important structural tool in the treatment of drug offenders by the criminal justice system. This research examined noncompliant behavior being sanctioned in a felony level drug court. The sample consisted of 66 high risk/high needs individuals who were enrolled in a drug court over a two-year period. Sanctionable behaviors were analyzed through a criminal-thinking framework in order to better understand noncompliant behavior in drug court. This study finds support for applying a criminal-thinking framework to noncompliant behavior sanctioned in drug court. The findings from this study illustrate the nuances of noncompliant behavior of a drug court population.

The purpose of this study was to explore whether creativity can be nurtured in an experiential learning environment at the college level. The study investigated how well process-based creativity models and construct-based creativity models reflected creative behavior in an experiential and team-based learning environment. The research design included field observations, focus group interviews, student questionnaires, and portfolio assessments. Study participants were selected students from Texas A&M University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Findings indicated that both process-based and construct-based creativity models are good indicators of creative behavior. Torrance’s creativity dimensions that emerged among students included problem awareness, ability to produce and consider many alternatives, ability to put ideas into context, ability to use humor, kinesthetic responsiveness, and ability to break through boundaries. Treffinger’s creativity dimensions included sensitivity to problems, tolerance of congruity, fluency, good research and management skills, cognition, memory, analysis, application, openness to experience, confidence, independence in inquiry, willingness to respond, and readiness for transformations. Dacey’s constructs included sensitivity to problems, divergent thinking, convergent thinking, openness, independence of judgment, self guidance, and playfulness. Jackson and Messick’s constructs included analysis, intuition, openness, and reflection. Study findings also indicated that all steps of the Osborn and Parnes processbased creativity model were fully utilized in the experiential and team-based learning environment. As part of the effort to seek models of teaching and learning that encourage students to be more creative while solving complex problems in the world of agriculture, findings of this study can be used to determine how creativity can be fostered through experiential and team-based learning.

The analysis of economic environment is the basis of well managerial decisions for enterprises. However, the relationship among economic variables in the real world is a kind of dynamic complexity problem. Economics usually take advantage of mathematics to solve this kind of problem. Therefore, it will be very difficult for business administrators to analyze the long-term dynamics competitive. This study integrated system dynamics thinking and dynamics of strategic maneuvering to build a systems feedback model of dynamic competitive environment, which can be used to analyze the long-term dynamics of competitive variables under different scenarios, including the dynamic thinking of growth and core competitive strategy. Linked with balanced scorecard interface, the model will become a decision support system of dynamic competitive analysis, which can provide business administrators with the analytic tool of dynamics competitive environment to improve their decision qualities concerning finance, production, and marketing.

Growth and sustainability seem to be the goals for all corporations. However, in the reality, only small number of corporations can sustain and keep growing; most corporations belong to one-shoot success or just stay stagnantly. Therefore, this study tried to figure out what is the main factor to make some corporations grow and the others decay. This study is based on an assumption that the main factor of corporation success depends on the alignment of corporate policies. If managers neglect the interactions of policies, it is possible to cause crises within the corporation and even make the corporation fall into decay. Only well-aligned policies can make corporations grow prosperously. Hence, policy design plays an important role to achieve the alignment. While going through the literatures on this subject, the domestic literatures are quit few. Therefore, this study has not only reviewed the relevant literatures, but also taken a domestic corporation as a studying case. This study used ¡§Systems Thinking¡¨ as a research tool to testify to the importance of dynamically aligned principles of the corporate policy design, and found the following conclusions: 1.Good intentions of the founder will lead to good corporation design, and the well-designed structure raises the intended behavior of employees. 2.Corporations have to design the policy base on long-term perspectives, and also develop the endurance to tolerate time delay. 3.Corporations should view the dynamically alignment of all policies as a whole and look for global optimization. 4.Well-designed policies will bring out the best operation performance.

This study aimed to explore teachers&rsquo / conceptions of critical thinking and practices for critical thinking development in Turkish, social studies, science and technology and mathematics courses at seventh grade level. The study was conducted with a phenomenological approach in which 70 teachers from 14 elementary schools in Ankara participated. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with teachers. The findings of the study revealed that there were cognitive skills, dispositions and criteria that teachers perceived to relate to critical thinking. The results also shed light on teachers&rsquo / perceptions on the acquisition of critical thinking, the roles that they assumed in the process of enhancing students&rsquo / critical thinking, teaching approaches they held with regard to the enhancement of students&rsquo / critical thinking, and the conditions that they deemed necessary to develop critical thinking in class. Moreover, teachers&rsquo / planning for the integration of critical thinking into their instruction revealed the limitations of the programs in teaching for critical thinking and the alterations that they made to eliminate these limitations and set the stage for students to think critically. In addition, teachers&rsquo / practices for the incorporation of critical thinking into instruction at seventh grade level illuminated instructional strategies that teachers used, in-class activities that they conducted, and assignments that they gave to students for the purpose of fostering their critical thinking. Furthermore, perceptions on teachers&rsquo / assessment of students&rsquo / critical thinking provided insight into the instruments that teachers used in the assessment of students&rsquo / critical thinking, the kind of critical thinking skills and dispositions that they aimed to assess, their perceptions on criteria by which they judged students&rsquo / critical thinking, and reasons behind any reservations about the assessment of students&rsquo / critical thinking. Besides, teachers&rsquo / perceptions on obstacles to and opportunities for the development of students&rsquo / critical thinking helped to identify the factors that inhibited or fostered their ability to focus on critical thinking skills in their classes. Finally, it should be noted that with regard to all the aforementioned issues, discipline-specific categories, as well as the categories across all four disciplines, emerged.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Drexel University, 2003. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-73).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 330-340). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

No description available.