The use of formative assessment in the classroom is becoming a more widely used practice and acceptable way to support students’ learning. There are several different strands to the formative concept of assessment for learning as opposed to assessment of learning. This research project looks at one strand of formative assessment, namely, the use of wait-time in the classroom. Three wait-time strategies were investigated and examples of their use are provided in an upper primary situation with three students of lower ability and challenging behaviours. Findings from this brief study show no conclusive evidence to support either the widely recognised use of increased wait-time to support a learner’s needs or the opposing view that brief wait-time, when used with students with behavioural issues, might increase academic responses and improve on-task behaviours. The use of one of the strategies, that of ‘talking partners’, demonstrated a slight increase in academic responses with members of the focus group. This research project, together with limitations and further research suggestions, is discussed.

Depuis les travaux de Bowlby (1969, 1977), la recherche a démontré l'influence de la relation d'attachement entre l'enfant et son parent sur le développement ultérieur de l'individu. Bien que les études dans le domaine de l'attachement aient permis de documenter certaines concordances entre les représentations d'attachement du parent et la sécurité d'attachement de l'enfant à son parent, il demeure difficile d'expliquer comment ces représentations d'attachement sont transmises d'une génération à une autre. Récemment, des chercheurs sont parvenus à démontrer que la fonction réflexive du parent permet de prédire la sécurité de l'attachement chez l'enfant. Par fonction réflexive (FR) on entend la capacité du parent de comprendre son propre comportement et celui de son enfant en fonction des états mentaux (pensées, désirs, croyances, sentiments) et des intentions sous-jacents. Il apparaît donc justifié d'intervenir auprès des dyades mère-enfant à risque dans le but de favoriser le développement de la fonction réflexive parentale (FRP) afin d'engendrer un impact sur l'enfant. La méthode Watch, Wait, and Wonder (3W), une approche psychothérapeutique utilisée auprès des dyades parent-enfant, propose au parent d'adopter une position d'observateur de son enfant, position qui favoriserait le développement de la FRP. La présente étude a permis de documenter l'évolution de la FR de mères issues d'une population à risque en évaluant leur FRP avant et après .une intervention psychothérapeutique selon l'approche 3W se déroulant en quinze séances. Les résultats suggèrent que les mères présentant une FRP plus élaborée profiteraient davantage de la méthode d'intervention 3W que les mères présentant une FRP plus limitée au départ. À la lumière de ces résultats, l'auteure propose des ajustements à la méthode 3W susceptibles de favoriser l'évolution de la FRP.

This is a mixed-methods study investigating parental satisfaction and wait times as parents inquire about an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis for their child in a Northern Ontario community. Satisfaction and wait times of those diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by a single practitioner were compared to satisfaction and wait times of those diagnosed by the multidisciplinary assessment team in the Sudbury/Manitoulin region (the Autism Diagnostic Team; ADT). No significant differences were noted between groups on satisfaction or wait times. However, ADT group received much more consistent service, with less variation in wait times between clients, and more consistent provision of comprehensive services prior to the diagnostic meeting. Points of interest are noted for practitioners including increased wait times for parents of children with milder forms of ASD and for girls. No differences in wait time or satisfaction were noted between language groups. Content analysis of the qualitative interviews representing mainly single practitioners saw the emergence of themes including difficulty activating the assessment process, concerns regarding the wait, and appointment demands. The importance of professional expertise, empathy, and respectful communication also emerged. Parents felt the experience was deeply distressing and they often experienced abandonment following the diagnostic process. Additionally, parents whose children did not receive a diagnosis often felt confusion about what to do next. Reducing wait times, increasing professional expertise, completing comprehensive assessments, and using truly interdisciplinary teams should continue to be the focus of service improvements that may translate into improved satisfaction.

The basis for this thesis involved a four month Accelerate Canada internship at the Grand River Hospital Emergency Department in Kitchener, Ontario. The Emergency Department (ED) Process Committee sought insight into strategies that could potentially reduce patient length of stay in the ED, thereby reducing wait times for emergency patients. This thesis uses discrete event simulation to model the overall system and to analyze the effect of various operational strategies within the fast track area of the emergency department. It discusses the design and development process for the simulation model, proposes various operational strategies to reduce patient wait times, and analyzes the different scenarios for an optimal fast track strategy. The main contribution of this thesis is the use of simulation to determine an optimal fast track strategy that reduces patient length of stay, thereby reducing patient wait times. Wait times were most significantly reduced when there was an increased physician presence/availability towards the fast track system. This had the greatest impact on the total time spent in the ED and also on queue length. The second most significant reduction to the performance measures occurred when an additional emergency nurse practitioner was supplemented to the fast track system. Accordingly, the nurse practitioner’s percent utilization increased. There was only one two-way interaction effect that was statistically significant in reducing the primary performance measure of wait times; however, the effect did not change the queue length, a secondary performance measure, by a significant amount. Finally, the implementation of a See-and-treat model variant for fast track had a negligible effect on both the average length of stay and queue length.

In a commercial Internet environment, the quality of service experienced by a user is critical to competitive advantage and business survivability. The availability and response time of a distributed software service are central components of the overall quality of service provided to users. Traditionally availability is a measure of service down time. Traditionally availability measures the probability that the service will be live and is expressed in terms of failure occurrence and repair or recovery time. Response time is a measure of the time taken from when the service request is made, to when service provision occurs for the user. Deteriorating response time is also a valuable indicator to denial of service attacks which continue to pose a significant threat to service availability. The concept of the service cluster is increasingly being deployed to improve service availability and response time. Cluster processor replication increases service availability. Cluster dispatching of service requests across the replicated cluster processors increases service scalability and therefore response time. This thesis commences with a review of the research and current technology in the area of distributed software service availability. The review aims to identify any deficiencies within that area and propose critical features that mitigate those deficiencies. The three critical features proposed are in relation to user wait time, cluster dispatching, and the trust-based filtering of service requests. The user wait time proposal is that the availability of a distributed service should reflect both liveness probability level and probabalistic user access time of the service. The cluster dispatching proposal is that dispatching processing overhead is a function of the number of Internet Protocol (IP) datagrams/Transport Control Protocol (TCP) segments that are received by the dispatcher in respect of each service request. Consequently the number of IP datagrams/TCP segments should be minimised ideally so that for each incoming service request there is one IP datagram/TCP segment. The trust-based filtering proposal is that the level of trust in respect of each service request should be identified by the service as this is critical in mitigating distributed denial of service attacks - and therefore maximising the availability of the service A conceptual availability model which supports the three critical features within an Internet clustered service environment is then described. The conceptual model proposes an expanded availability definition and then describes the realization of this definition via additional capabilities positioned within the Transport layer of the Internet communication environment. The additional capabilities of this model also facilitate the minimization of cluster dispatcher processing load and the identification by the cluster dispatcher of request trust level. The model is then implemented within the Linux kernel. The implementation involves the addition of several options to the existing TCP specification and also the addition of several functions to the existing Socket API. The implementation is subsequently evaluated in a dispatcher-based clustered service environment.

Thesis (M.S.H.P.) / BACKGROUND: Emergency department (ED) visits for psychiatric issues have grown at a disproportionately higher rate than other visits. This has been attributed to factors including severe cuts in mental health (MH) services and identified as a culprit in ED overcrowding. Little is known, however, about how mental health reason-for-visit (MHRFV) interacts with patient and hospital characteristics to affect wait times to see an ED provider. OBJECTIVE: To determine if wait time (WT) to see a provider at the ED differs for those presenting with MHRFV and how various patient and hospital-level characteristics interact to affect it. METHODS: Data were obtained from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS) for visits to EDs throughout the United States. We examined data for patients ≥ 18 years of age who visited an ED in years 2009 and 2010. Patient weights were used to generate national estimates. Patients’ primary reasons-for-visit were used to identify the MH group for analysis and comparison to all other RFVs. Predictors of WT were chosen based on the Andersen Behavioral and ED overcrowding models. WTs were log-transformed for initial bivariate and final multivariate regression models to assure a more normal distribution. RESULTS: Mean WT was 56.5 and 55.8 minutes for MHRFV and all others respectively with a shared median of 31 minutes. As expected with our large sample (n = 47,831), all variables of interest were significantly associated with WT. Adjusting for patient and hospital level characteristics, a multivariate regression revealed that MHRFV prolonged WT by about 50%. After adjustment for independent variables, interactions with MHRFV were tested as the main outcomes of interest. Blacks with MHRFV had WTs 62% longer, patients age 41-64 31% longer, payer status of Medicare/Medicaid or no coverage had WTs about 24% and 14% longer than private insurance. Conversely, patients at government owned hospitals had WTs 145%, and non-profits 42%, lower than private hospitals. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first time that ED WT has been examined in this depth with a sample of patients presenting with MH issues. The results indicate that disparities are more pronounced in this subgroup of ED patients. / 2031-01-01

Emergency surgeries are serviced by three main forms of capacity: dedicated operating room time reserved for emergency surgeries, alternative (on call) capacity, and lastly, canceling of elective surgeries. The objective of this research is to model capacity implications of meeting wait time targets for multiple priority levels in the context of emergency surgeries. Initial attempts to solve the capacity evaluation problem were made using a non-linear optimisation model, however, this model was intractable. A simulation model was then used to examine the trade-off between additional dedicated operating room capacity (and consequent idle capacity) versus increased re-scheduling of elective surgeries while keeping reserved time for emergency surgeries low. Considered performance measures include utilization of operating room time, elective re-scheduling, and wait times by priority class. Finally, the instantaneous utilization of different types of downstream beds is determined to aid in capacity planning. The greatest number of patients seen within their respective wait time targets is achieved by a combination of additional on call capacity and a variation of the rule allowing low priority patients to utilize on call capacity. This also maintains lower cancelations of elective surgeries than the current situation. Although simulation does not provide an optimum solution it enables a comparison of different scenarios. This simulation model can determine appropriate capacity levels for servicing emergency patients of different priorities with different wait time targets.

Reducing ED wait times is a top health care priority for the Ontario government and hospitals in Ontario are incentivised to meet provincial ED wait time targets. In this study, we considered the costs and benefits associated with increasing the number of acute-care beds to reduce the time an admitted patient spends boarding in the ED. A shorter hospital LOS has often been cited as a potential benefit associated with shorter ED wait times. We derived a multivariable Cox regression model to examine this association. We found no significant association between ED boarding times and the time to discharge. Using a Markov model, we estimated an increased annual operating cost of $2.1m to meet the prescribed wait time targets. We concluded that increasing acute-care beds to reduce ED wait times would require significant funding from hospitals and would have no effect on total length of stay of hospitalized patients.

Flaky tests are defined as tests that show non-deterministic outcomes, meaning they can show both passing and failing results without changes to the code. These tests cause a major problem in the software development process since it can be difficult to know if the cause of a failure originates from the production- or test code. Developers may choose to ignore failing tests known to be flaky when they might actually hide real bugs in the production code. This thesis investigates a specific category of flaky tests known as "Async Wait", which are tests that makes asynchronous calls to servers and other remote resources and fails to properly wait for the results to be returned. There are tools available for detecting flaky tests, but most of these need the test to be executed and operate on run time information. In order to detect potential flakiness in an even earlier state, this thesis looks in to if it is possible to predict flaky outcomes by analyzing only at the test code itself without running it. The scope is limited to the Async Wait only to determine in which cases and under what circumstances developing an algorithm to automatically detect these flaky tests would be possible in this category. Commits from open source projects on GitHub were scanned for Async Wait flaky tests with the intention of finding the characteristics of the asynchronous calls and how the waiting for them is handled as well as how the flakiness is resolved by developers in practice in order to see if the information in only the test code is enough to predict flaky behavior.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第20883号 / 理博第4335号 / 新制||理||1623(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院理学研究科数学・数理解析専攻 / (主査)教授 西村 進, 教授 上 正明, 教授 長谷川 真人 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DFAM