This three-year study is an ethnography of communication of a private high school in Japan. The purpose of this study is to investigate how teachers at this private high school understand their environment in the context of changes in Japanese education and even larger changes in Japanese society. These changes include a decreasing population in Japan, shifting university admission policies, and changes to teacher licensing regulations. Methods of data collection include participant observations, interviews, artifact collection, and focus groups. Although the focus is on teachers, students and informants outside of the school are included in order to provide a fuller picture of the context in which the study is conducted. These data are viewed through the lens of Communities of Practice developed by Etienne Wenger and also through the Ethnography of Communication framework. The intended audience for this study includes people interested in cross-cultural studies, Japanese studies, educators teaching in or studying secondary education outside of Japan, teacher trainers, and western educators working in Japan as well as Japanese educators. The findings suggest that changes in student population numbers, university entrance requirements, and licensing procedures have all placed new demands upon teachers. Japan’s decreasing population places greater requirements upon teachers in private high schools to help with student recruitment, and one way to do this is by supporting efforts to brand the school name. In addition, shifting admission policies have placed an emphasis on the connection between high schools and their associated universities. Schools actively work to protect this relationship by introducing new elements to the curriculum in an attempt to better prepare students for the university experience. Finally, changes to teacher licensing regulations have introduced teacher training to private high schools as well as new members to the central community of practice in the school, the gakunen, or the group of teachers and students assigned to a year grade. The response to these new members has varied both among the newcomers and the teachers who were licensed before the changes were introduced. Further data collection and analysis reveal how other societal trends shape the local practices of teachers, and how the teachers in the gakunen community of practice work at times together, and at times to resolve conflicts with each other, students, and parents as they confront demands being placed on educators in Japan in the 21st century. / Teaching & Learning

La tesis se inscribe en un doble ámbito científico formado por la Estadística y la Pedagogía. El objetivo de la tesis es la investigación de modelos estadísticos y estrategias de análisis que puedan ser de utilidad en el seguimiento de sistemas de evaluación complejos. Su motivación se encuentra en la necesidad de analizar las Pruebas de Aptitud para el Acceso a la Universidad (PAAU), que regulan el acceso a la universidad en España, desde la perspectiva de la ciencia estadística. La validez y fiabilidad de los exámenes COU (Curso de Orientación Universitaria) y PAAU han merecido una atención especial a lo largo de la investigación. Asimismo, se analizan con detenimiento las principales fuentes de variación de dichas notas: las diferencias entre centros de secundaria y el proceso de corrección de las pruebas PAAU.En la Introducción, una vez resumidas las características del sistema de evaluación de las pruebas PAAU y discutido el papel de la estadística en el tratamiento de datos en educación, se establecen los objetivos concretos de la tesis, a la luz de las necesidades existentes y de los trabajos de investigación realizados hasta el momento.El Capítulo 1 ilustra las diferencias entre los exámenes COU y las pruebas PAAU. Se aborda el estudio de la asociación entre ambas puntuaciones. La modelización de la variación de la nota PAAU individual por medio de modelos de regresión coeficientes aleatorios permite evidenciar (y medir) las diferencias entre centros de secundaria en cuanto a los estándares utilizados en COU. Este primer capítulo contiene una detallada introducción a los modelos de coeficientes aleatorios, también llamados modelos de nivel múltiple, que posteriormente se aplicaran en los capítulos 2 y 4, en la versión de modelos multivariantes de componentes de la varianza. El segundo capitulo, en un enfoque que complementa el anterior, se centra en el estudio de las medias (de COU y de PAAU) de cada centro, en la estructura de covarianza entre ambas. Como resultado relevante cabe citar la aplicación a la selección de la combinación más eficiente. El Capítulo 3 se ha dedicado enteramente a la calidad del sistema de corrección de los exámenes PAAU. La modelización presentada ha permitido evaluar el impacto de los correctores en términos de la varianza debida a las diferencias en el grado de severidad y a la varianza generada por la inconsistencia. Para la obtención de los datos se ha requerido del diseño de experimentos. Dichos experimentos, que han evidenciado una serie de puntos débiles del sistema, deberían ser realizados de manera sistemática cada año en una estrategia de mejora de la calidad del proceso. El Capítulo 4 estudia la covarianza del conjunto de notas PAAU tanto a nivel estudiante como a nivel centro, ofreciendo nuevos elementos de reflexión para la validez de dichas pruebas. El Capítulo 5 resume la aplicación de varias propuestas de la tesis a la primera convocatoria de las pruebas PAAU-LOGSE. El Capítulo 6 incluye las conclusiones de la tesis así como una serie de propuestas de seguimiento y mejora de la calidad global del sistema.

The first essay is The linkage between foreign direct investment and international migration. Immigration policy and policies regarding the flow of capital across borders are generally enacted separately. Such separation may not be appropriate if there are interactions between immigration and foreign direct investment (FDI). Although much research has focused on the determinants of international migration, little agreement has been made with respect to how FDI affects migration. In this paper, we attempt to clarify the influence of FDI on migration. We consider not only how aggregate FDI into country i affects migration from i to j but also how the FDI that i receives specifically from country j (which we denote as bilateral FDI) affects migration from i to j. We find that bilateral FDI stock has a positive and significant impact on the size of migrant stock through what we call an ``ideological linkage". We show that this finding is robust across different estimation methods, including instrumental variables Tobit and Heckman selection models. We conclude that the influence of FDI on migration needs to be considered when designing economic policies. The second essay is Environmental quality and international migration. This essay examines the extent of which pollution is a factor that pushes people to migrate across borders. It provides an empirical analysis of the aspects of air quality and its unexplored role in the international migration. We allow pollution to affect migrants differently according to their gender and educational attainment. We also consider different types of air pollution such as sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. We then test for the interaction between environmental quality and income upon migration. We find that air pollution is a push factor but not necessarily for countries with very high incomes. We also find evidence supporting that there is a gender difference in the migration-environment association. Finally, the third essay is The effects of foreign universities on domestic human capital accumulation. In this essay, we focus on the impact of foreign direct investment in education (i.e., foreign universities opening up branches overseas) on human capital formation in the host countries. High ranking universities have the privilege to enter foreign market and usually enjoy subsidy from the host country. However, the entry of low quality foreign universities may have positive impact on domestic human capital accumulation with less uncertainty. In our model, we have three types of universities: high quality foreign universities located domestically, low quality foreign universities located domestically and domestic universities. Agents in the model represent students in the host country who decide upon their level of preparedness for a university education. As comparative statics exercises, we examine how effort changes when the slots of high quality or low quality foreign institutions change. Results from these comparative statics exercises could help a government choose the optimal size of high quality or low quality foreign universities where optimal means maximizing aggregate effort. We also examine the effect of foreign education premium on human capital accumulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first economics-based, theoretical study of this issue. We conclude that the entry of low quality foreign universities generally increases domestic human capital accumulation whereas allowing more high quality universities to enter the country produces less straightforward results. We also find that lowering the wage gap could have beneficial effects on human capital accumulation.

This study is concerned with the problem of measuring, describing, and analyzing the academic performance and progress toward graduation over a five-year period (1977- 1983) of students who entered a large public university through an admissions review committee process for presumptive-deny students. The purpose of this study is to compare the academic performance of these students (N = 310) with that of randomly selected students who entered through the regular admissions process (N = 350) to determine if the review committee's decisions were as effective in selecting students for admission as were the objective data (college entrance examination scores and rank in high school class) used in the regular admissions process. Neither transfer nor non-United States citizens were included in either group.

No description available.

Although much has been written about the challenges affecting transfer students, a mixed method study on transfer admission, particularly at the institutional level is an intriguing, albeit unexplored endeavor. In Texas, there is an added dimension of interest given the presence and popularity of the Top 10% Law. This study sought to provide a comprehensive portrait of transfer admission at The University of Texas at Austin from the 1990s to 2007. A sequential explanatory design was employed to identify changes in transfer admission policy and practice and to address if there were differences in admission rates among the major transfer pathways to the state’s largest flagship institution (Creswell, Plano Clark, Gutmann, & Hanson, 2003). Two main conclusions emerged from this study. First, transfer admission became more competitive and selective after the passage of the state’s Top 10% Law in 1997. Second, qualitative and quantitative findings suggested the implementation of a conditional transfer guarantee program for highly selective freshman applicants resulted in significantly less opportunity for transfer applicants from community colleges and other transfer routes to be admitted. Based on these findings, recommendations included reinvesting in a community college transfer student recruitment and scholarship program and significantly reducing the size of the university’s conditional transfer guarantee program for admissible freshmen applicants. A final suggestion was to identify and value the community college route in the holistic transfer admission process given the large proportion of first-generation college, low-income students who comprise this population. To avoid perceptions of sponsored mobility and to promote a social justice rationale, a pre-selection transfer program to prospective freshmen should be revisited given the adverse effects on the community college transfer population. With over 600,000 students enrolled in Texas 2-year colleges, a viable pathway to the state’s most prestigious flagship university provides increased opportunities for social mobility to the many competitively admissible first-generation and low-income students populating public 2-year colleges and seeking a baccalaureate degree from UT Austin. / text

The selection of machine learning algorithm used to solve a problem is an important choice. This paper outlines research measuring three performance metrics for eight different algorithms on a prediction task involving under- graduate admissions data. The algorithms that were tested are k-nearest neighbours, decision trees, random forests, gradient tree boosting, logistic regression, naive bayes, support vector machines, and artificial neural net- works. These algorithms were compared in terms of accuracy, training time, and execution time. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)