Parents\u27 Impact on Their Young Children\u27s Literacy Achievement

Many children enter formal schooling with a propensity toward literacy success while others lack foundational skills that adequately support literacy achievement. Researchers acknowledge if certain skills are not present upon entrance into formal schooling, literacy success can be affected. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine first-grade students\u27 home literacy experiences prior to receiving formal reading instruction in a one suburban public school. Bruner\u27s theory of scaffolding, which suggests that parents and teachers support children in the learning process, and Vygotsky\u27s concept of zone of proximal development provided the conceptual framework for this study. The research questions focused on literacy events parents used at home with their preschool-age children. Twelve parents of first grade students were interviewed for their perspectives on literacy experiences with their children at home. Data were examined for common themes using a typological analysis to determine types of parent-child interactions that promote children\u27s positive attitudes and academic success in reading. The data revealed that parents, who view themselves as their children\u27s primary teachers and provide literacy instruction to their children prior to entering school, have children who are high achieving readers. A recommendation is that the target school district provides parent education programs to equip parents of preschool-age children with skills that promote success in literacy. Positive social change might occur when district teachers partner with parents to create home learning environments to improve children\u27s literacy academic achievement

Understanding the everyday designer in organisations

This paper builds upon the existing concept of an everyday designer as a non-expert designer who carries out design activities using available resources in a given environment. It does so by examining the design activities undertaken by non-expert, informal, designers in organisations who make use of the formal and informal technology already in use in organisations while designing to direct, influence, change or transform the practices of people in the organisation. These people represent a cohort of designers who are given little attention in the literature on information systems, despite their central role in the formation of practice and enactment of technology in organisations. The paper describes the experiences of 18 everyday designers in an academic setting using three concepts: everyday designer in an organisation, empathy through design and experiencing an awareness gap. These concepts were constructed through the analysis of in-depth interviews with the participants. The paper concludes with a call for tool support for everyday designers in organisations to enable them to better understand the audience for whom they are designing and the role technology plays in the organisation

The Grassroots Pro-Asylum Seeker Movement in the Republic of Ireland: A Social Movement Perspective

This thesis is an in-depth analysis of the Grassroots Pro-Asylum Seeker Movement in the Republic of Ireland between 1994 and 2004. It seeks to understand and analyse this development of the Grassroots Pro-Asylum Seeker Movement in Ireland from a social movement perspective. The movement itself contains three key phases of mobilisation: 1) Radical Anti-Racism; 2) The Multicultural Support Group and; 3) The Anti-Deportation Group. Each of these phases is described in detail in the narrative of the movement. Using the concept historicity I argue that each phase of the movement constructs a specific relationship between itself, the asylum-seeker and the Irish state. The nature and significance of each of these relationships is analysed by focussing upon the role that formal ideology plays in the construction of these relationships. This analysis is then complemented by an examination of the process of collective identity construction. I argue that this is crucial to the process of change within the movement and that there are formal and informal levels of action in the movement. Collective identity plays a key role in how the informal level of action operates. I will show that this leads to the creation of alternative systems of meaning and action that facilitate change at a group level. Lastly, I theoretically situate the final phase of mobilisation as being significantly different from the first two. I argue that this phase of the movement is indicative of a shift towards a “politics of the subject” on the behalf of the movement. I then illustrate how the movement at many points concerns itself with the larger process of desubjectivation in Irish society or how increasingly our subjective and objective worlds are growing further apart

The Grassroots Pro-Asylum Seeker Movement in the Republic of Ireland: A Social Movement Perspective

This thesis is an in-depth analysis of the Grassroots Pro-Asylum Seeker Movement in the Republic of Ireland between 1994 and 2004. It seeks to understand and analyse this development of the Grassroots Pro-Asylum Seeker Movement in Ireland from a social movement perspective. The movement itself contains three key phases of mobilisation: 1) Radical Anti-Racism; 2) The Multicultural Support Group and; 3) The Anti-Deportation Group. Each of these phases is described in detail in the narrative of the movement. Using the concept historicity I argue that each phase of the movement constructs a specific relationship between itself, the asylum-seeker and the Irish state. The nature and significance of each of these relationships is analysed by focussing upon the role that formal ideology plays in the construction of these relationships. This analysis is then complemented by an examination of the process of collective identity construction. I argue that this is crucial to the process of change within the movement and that there are formal and informal levels of action in the movement. Collective identity plays a key role in how the informal level of action operates. I will show that this leads to the creation of alternative systems of meaning and action that facilitate change at a group level. Lastly, I theoretically situate the final phase of mobilisation as being significantly different from the first two. I argue that this phase of the movement is indicative of a shift towards a “politics of the subject” on the behalf of the movement. I then illustrate how the movement at many points concerns itself with the larger process of desubjectivation in Irish society or how increasingly our subjective and objective worlds are growing further apart

Knowledge based approach to flexible workflow management systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).Today's business environments are characterized by dynamic and uncertain environments. In order to effectively support business processes in such contexts, workflow management systems must be able to adapt themselves effectively. In this dissertation, the workflow is redefined in concept and represented with a set of business rules. Business rules play a central role in organizational workflows in context of cooperation among actors. To achieve business goals, they constrain the flow of works, use of resources, and responsibility mapping between tasks and actors using role concept. Business rules are explicitly modeled in the Knowledge-based Workflow Model (KWM) using frames. To increase the adaptability of workflow management system, KWM has several distinctive features. First, it increases expressiveness of workflow model so that exception handling rules and responsibility mapping rules between tasks and actors as well as task scheduling rules are explicitly modeled. Secondly, formal definition of KWM enables one to define and to analyze correctness of workflow schema. Knowledge-based approach enables more powerful analysis on workflow schema including checking consistency and compactness of routing rules as well as terminality of a workflow. Thirdly, providing change propagation mechanism which assures correctness of workflow after the modification of workflow schema increases adaptability. Change propagation rules for the modification primitives are provided to manage workflow evolution. On the other hand, metarules that control rules in KWM are used to handle exceptions that occur in a running workflow instance. Workflow participants can easily change workflow schema of a workflow instance with the support of extra rules and a metarule. Based on KWM, K-WFMS (Knowledge-based WorkFlow Management System) has been implemented in client/server architecture. Inference shell of knowledge-based systems is employed for enactment of business rules and integrated with database systems. From a real application based on the KWM architecture, it has been shown that system performance can increase notably by reducing the number of rules and facts that are used in the course of workflow enactment

Revisiting Numerical Pattern Mining with Formal Concept Analysis

In this paper, we investigate the problem of mining numerical data in the framework of Formal Concept Analysis. The usual way is to use a scaling procedure --transforming numerical attributes into binary ones-- leading either to a loss of information or of efficiency, in particular w.r.t. the volume of extracted patterns. By contrast, we propose to directly work on numerical data in a more precise and efficient way, and we prove it. For that, the notions of closed patterns, generators and equivalent classes are revisited in the numerical context. Moreover, two original algorithms are proposed and used in an evaluation involving real-world data, showing the predominance of the present approach

“Financial inclusion does not come easily”:An institutional analysis of the development of the microfinance markets

Microfinance has grown from a niche development intervention in the 1990s to one that commands global influence and donor support. By 2006 microfinance had become part of financial sector development policy through the concept of financial inclusion. At the same time theoretical analysis of economic development increasingly focused on the role of institutions and getting institutions right - including for the financial sector – which has given rise to attempts to theorize gradual institutional change. This convergence of policy, and theoretical emphasis on institutions, raises the central question as to what institutions and institutional changes are necessary for the financial sector to effectively serve poor people. The experience of microfinance sector growth over a decade in two countries has been investigated using a ‘micro-ethnographic’ methodology to respond to this question. The research finds that a focus on institutional functions rather than institutional forms aids definitional precision and allows comparability across markets. Social norms underpinned the development of institutional functions, as theories of social embeddedness suggest. These norms also became integrated into institutional functions through the process of change, adding to critiques of externally imposed ‘best practice’ institutional blueprints. Further, beyond the widely accepted institutional functions which the rest of the financial market needs to operate efficiently, this research highlights the importance of a constitutional function (or law) to include poor people in the formal financial system, appropriate supervision for microfinance providers and support for the development of microfinance. Recent theories of institutional change offer insights beyond path dependency in identifying spaces for change and how changes will ‘stick’. However, to better analyse change at the level of particular institutional arenas, greater elaboration is needed of: how to incorporate multiple sets of agents (including external development agents) and multiple institutional functions; appropriate time-frames for analysis and processes of actor engagement.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Distributed Leadership: A Review of Literature

A review of empirical research studies of distributed leadership from public and private sector settings completed since 1995

Culture-based artefacts to inform ICT design: foundations and practice

Cultural aspects frame our perception of the world and direct the many different ways people interact with things in it. For this reason, these aspects should be considered when designing technology with the purpose to positively impact people in a community. In this paper, we revisit the foundations of culture aiming to bring this concept in dialogue with design. To inform design with cultural aspects, we model reality in three levels of formality: informal, formal, and technical, and subscribe to a systemic vision that considers the technical solution as part of a more complex social system in which people live and interact. In this paper, we instantiate this theoretical and methodological view by presenting two case studies of technology design in which culture-based artefacts were employed to inform the design process. We claim that as important as including issues related to culture in the ICT design agenda—from the conception to the development, evaluation, and adoption of a technology—is the need to support the design process with adequate artefacts that help identifying cultural aspects within communities and translating them into sociotechnical requirements. We argue that a culturally informed perspective on design can go beyond an informative analysis, and can be integrated with the theoretical and methodological framework used to support design, throughout the entire design process