Teachers' learning styles : their effect on teaching styles

4, 107 leaves ; 29 cm.No abstract

A proposal to study the effectiveness of the FRIENDS for Life program

The overall purpose of my Masters of Education (Counselling Psychology) project is to present a research proposal designed to replicate past findings showing the effectiveness of a cognitive-behavioural resilience-building/anxiety prevention program called “FRIENDS for Life” (FFL) within an Alberta school district. Anxiety and anxiety disorders represent the most common and debilitating forms of psychopathology in children (Donovan & Spence, 2000; Wehry, Beesdo-Baum, Hennelly, Connolly, & Strawn, 2015) thus, research efforts have begun to prioritize the development and ongoing effectiveness of anxiety prevention and intervention programs. While two studies performed in Canada indicate that the FFL program is effective in lowering rates of self-reported anxiety in some students (Rose, Miller, & Martinez, 2009; Miller, et al.,2011) this does not inevitably imply its success in other provincial school systems. As a result, the following is a detailed research design with the goal of providing future researchers a framework to evaluate the FFL program within specific community and/or school settings

A qualitative disaggregation of faculty perceptions of workplace bullying initiatives: an intensive case study of a Canadian university

Numerous universities around the world have policies and procedures in place to deal with workplace bullying. However, the effectiveness of these HR interventions often depends on the perceptions of the university employees (Chang, 2005). This thesis attempts to disaggregate the different factors that lead to the creation of employee perceptions in the faculty sub-set, with regards to their organization’s workplace bullying policies and interventions. This study is conducted using exploratory qualitative interviews of faculty at a mid-sized Canadian university and is analyzed using thematic coding analysis

The evolution of skilled forelimb movements in carnivorans

xii, 151 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.Emancipating the forelimbs from locomotion for use in other activities, such as food manipulation, is a major evolutionary milestone. A variety of selective forces and evolutionary correlates may influence the evolution of various degrees of skill with which the forelimbs are used. Using the order Carnivora as a test group, I assesed the relative influence of six factors: relative brain size, neocortical volume, manus proportions, body size, phylogenetic relatedness, type of locomotion and diet. I developed a rating system to describe the dexterity of individual species and compared the scores to the six factors using modern comparative methods. Only phylogeny and diet were significanly correlated with forelimb dexterity. More specifically, forelimb dexterity tends to be higher in caniform than in feliform carnivorans and decreases with increasing specialisation on vertebrate prey. I conclude that food handling and feeding niche breath have a significant effect upon the evolution of skilled forelimb movements

Short-term changes in daily movement behaviour influence C-reactive protein in healthy, middle-aged women

Despite growing awareness of the health consequences of sedentary time (ST), the underlying physiological mechanisms are poorly understood. C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of systemic inflammation, represents a potential link between ST and adverse health. It has also become apparent that prolonged, uninterrupted bouts of ST are particularly harmful to health. The primary purpose of this thesis was to explore the effect of (a) increased ST and (b) increased physical activity (PA) on salivary CRP in healthy, middle-aged women. A secondary objective was to examine how the pattern of activity changes in response to these behavioural interventions. After completing a 7-day preliminary assessment of daily step count, ST, and PA, 20 healthy, middle-aged women were randomly assigned to one of two 10-day interventions, either sedentary or active. The sedentary group reduced their step count to <5000 steps/day. The active group added 3,000 steps/day to their preliminary average. During both the preliminary assessment and intervention period, participants wore a pedometer to monitor their daily step count and an accelerometer to objectively assess their activity profile. Salivary CRP samples were taken during the preliminary assessment, pre-intervention, and post-intervention. During the intervention, the sedentary group (n=9; 49.65.6 yrs; 28.43.5 kg•m-2) significantly increased ST by 70 minutes/day, and decreased both light physical activity (LPA) and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). They also increased the number of prolonged sedentary bouts (p = 0.004) and decreased the frequency of iv interruptions to ST (p = 0.006). The active group (n=10; 49.95.2 yrs; 26.63.7 kg•m-2) increased MVPA by 19.4 minutes/day, but there was no change in ST, LPA, or the pattern of ST accumulation. After 10 days of behavior change, CRP increased by 31% in the sedentary group (p<0.05) and decreased by 22% in the active group (p<0.01). These results suggest that CRP, and thus inflammation, may represent a physiological link between movement behavior and health in middle-aged women. The decrease in CRP in the active group despite no change in ST challenges current data that shows ST impacts health independent of MVPA. Importantly, interventions focused on increasing MVPA may not effectively reduce ST.University of Lethbridge Research Fun

Characterization of small nucleolar RNAs in the protist organism Euglena gracilis

Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have diverse cellular roles in all three domains of life. One class of ncRNAs termed small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) play a role in RNA modification and processing in archaea and eukaryotic organisms. ncRNAs (including snoRNAs) remain largely unexplored in a group of unicellular eukaryotes known as protists. The focus of this study was to characterize snoRNAs in the protist organism Euglena gracilis in terms of their genomic arrangement, expression and evolution using experimental and computational methods. Numerous novel snoRNAs were characterized, many of which reside in tandemly repeated clusters that can be transcribed polycistronically. Some snoRNA gene clusters are surprisingly large, possibly the largest characterized to date. A mechanism of snoRNA evolution to support the unusually large number of snoRNAs and clustered modification sites in E. gracilis was characterized. These findings exemplify snoRNA diversity and highlight the importance of ncRNA characterization in a broad range of organisms.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) (Discovery Grant and Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarships)

Gendered obstacles and opportunities for women seeking positions of prime minister and president: the case of Yulia Tymoshenko of Ukraine, 1999-2010

This thesis is a case study of Yulia Tymoshenko, who was twice prime minister of Ukraine in 2005 and from 2007-2010 yet failed to achieve the position of president in 2010. Due to her political achievements and her inability to reach the highest position of power in Ukraine, Tymoshenko presents an interesting case study. I begin with Nirmal Puwar’s (2004) discussion of women politicians as "space invaders" and analyze how societal understandings of gender intertwine with assumptions about spatial barriers. By analyzing Tymoshenko's biographical information, including her personal details and political background as well as media representations of Tymoshenko in the English-language press, I seek to understand the gendered aspects of Tymoshenko's political career and how gender has affected her access to the prime ministership and the presidency. The conclusions offer insight into strategies women leaders use to access positions of leadership, while also performing their gender normativity

In the wake of austerity: social impact bonds and the financialisation of the welfare state in Britain

This paper provides an analysis of the financialisation of the British welfare state. In a continuation of neo-liberal privatisation and labour market activation, the financialised welfare state pursues a policy of welfare retrenchment, while engaging in forms of social engineering aimed at producing self-responsibilised individuals and communities who are financially literate, ‘investment-ready’ and economically productive. New financial instruments such as social impact bonds are deployed to these ends, both to ‘solve social problems’ and enable cost saving. Through the use of such financial instruments, the implementation of regulatory infrastructures and tax incentives, the financialised welfare state becomes a vehicle for the transfer of wealth from the public to private investors, while subjecting the domain of social policy to the vicissitudes of global financial markets. This paper offers a critique of these developments, situating the case of Britain within the broader global context and with regard to the implications for understanding the current political economy of the welfare state

Exact Bayesian curve fitting and signal segmentation.

We consider regression models where the underlying functional relationship between the response and the explanatory variable is modeled as independent linear regressions on disjoint segments. We present an algorithm for perfect simulation from the posterior distribution of such a model, even allowing for an unknown number of segments and an unknown model order for the linear regressions within each segment. The algorithm is simple, can scale well to large data sets, and avoids the problem of diagnosing convergence that is present with Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) approaches to this problem. We demonstrate our algorithm on standard denoising problems, on a piecewise constant AR model, and on a speech segmentation problem

Trade unions, civil society organisations and health reforms

This article provides an analysis of resistance to neoliberalism and commodification in the public healthcare sector as seen from a trade union perspective. It uses recent research on social-movement unionism and new labour internationalism to structure a series of case studies examining resistance to different dimensions of healthcare commodification in four countries. The range of alliances trade unions are making do not fit tidily into one model, but give insights into the movement elements of trade unionism. This dimension must be strengthened, but can also be in tension with collective bargaining and other institutional processes. How to constantly reconcile these different positions is the future challenge facing trade unions