Kresge Foundation 2010-2011 Annual Report

Contains an introduction to Kresge's strategy; board chair's letter; president's letter; foundation timeline; program information; grant summary, including geographic distribution; grants lists; financial summary; and lists of board members and staff

Academic Ethics: What has Morality, Culture and Administration got to do with its Measurement?

While there is no dearth of studies on ethical issues, the specific subject of examination misconduct has attracted fewer studies, especially in Africa. This study is an ongoing exploratory attempt to develop a measure of examination misconduct. Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data from 450 undergraduate business students of the Universities of Botswana and Swaziland. A nine-item measure of examination misconduct was correlated with a measure of perception of business ethics, ethical value assessment and Hofstede's four dimensions of culture. The results indicated significant inter-correlations among the variables (especially the three measures of ethics) and limited construct validity for the examination misconduct scale. The results of factor analysis suggest three factors for the emerging scale: cheating behaviour, intervention and desperation. The ethical inferences of the findings, managerial implications for university administrators and practitioners, study limitations and directions for future research are discussed

Contextualisation of instructional time utilising mobile social networks for learning efficiency: a participatory action research study for technical vocational education and training learners in South Africa

Despite the fact that some studies have shown a connection between learning efficiency and instructional time, there is lack of research that has been carried out within the Technical Vocational Education and Training sector with a particular focus on National Certificate Vocational programmes. To fill this gap, the current study utilised WhatsApp, an instance of a Mobile Social Network, in extending instructional time beyond the normal lecturing timetables with the objective of improving learning efficiency for NCV learners studying Computer Programming as a subject. To achieve the objective, a pragmatic approach was adopted in carrying out a participatory action research project. Qualitative data and quantitative data were collected concurrently in three phases using semi-structured interviews, questionnaire and documents. Thematic analyses and statistical analyses were applied to the data collected from five colleges in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The findings of the study highlighted multiple issues: Firstly, awareness of instructional time phenomena was very minimal from the lecturers and the learners. Secondly, there were no formal interventions in place to recover or extend instructional time beyond the traditional college boundaries. In overall, the implementation of WhatsApp was well-supported at the five locations. However, statistical results from the five locations after implementation of the intervention were mixed. Results indicated an overall pass rate of 69.2% (n=54) of the total number of learners (N=78) who sat for the final examination. While pass rates at each of the other four locations was above 50%, the pass rate of the fifth location was considerably low (37%). The study generated three contributions to knowledge: practical, theoretical and methodological. Firstly, through the study, practical interventions were generated to assist learners outside the classes. Secondly, the thesis generated propositions from data and an integrated Mobile Social Network framework was developed which is expected to be a useful course of action for lecturers who want to improve learning efficiency through extending instructional time. A key methodological contribution has been the application of mixed methods choices in the collection, analyses of data and interpretation of results

Spartan Daily, March 30, 1965

Volume 52, Issue 97https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/4712/thumbnail.jp

Finding a niche: the potential of a college of education to become an in-service teacher education institution

Project 1: This is a literature review on the teaching of ecology in South African schools. The importance of ecology education in the school curriculum is well reported. It is also reported that in spite of the apparent importance of the subject, not much ecology is taught or learned in schools. This report examines what ecology is supposed to be about and the challenges that confront its teaching. The approaches to teaching the subject are also discussed. It would seem that if teachers focus on teaching ecological concepts using constructivist teaching/learning strategies, students might be helped to learn ecology meaningfully. Project 2: 'Constructing eco-concepts' is a case study that reports the effects of a module whose design was informed by social constructivist ideas on the understanding of selected ecological concepts by college students. Social constructivism as a philosophy of learning has gained increasing attention in science education in recent times and yet the approach is so alien to so many. Many teachers still teach by the traditional teacher-centred approaches. This research project reports the conceptual change of students after undertaking the module. It also reports the students' perceptions about the teaching/learning strategies employed in the module. It would seem that the social constructivist strategies used in the module assisted the students to improve their frameworks of ecological concepts. Data also tend to reveal that the students enjoyed the approach to learning and had positive views about the social constructivist teaching/learning approach. Project 3: With the advent of the new curriculum framework for South Africa, the outcomes based curriculum, it would seem that teachers could no longer approach teaching by the traditional transmission methods. Colleges of education have been criticised for producing teachers who do not seem to be adequately prepared for their job. Presently, the argument seems to be that teachers would need in-service education on a wide scale and the colleges of education would seem to be important in-service teacher education centres. This research, using case study methodology, investigated the potential of one of the colleges of education to become an in-service teacher education institution based on its physical and human resources

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation - 1995 Annual Report

Contains president's message, program information, summary of foundation initiatives, grants list, financial statements, and list of staff