1,720,957 research outputs found
Perceptions of Early Childhood Development practitioners regarding professionalisation
Full text linkDissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2017.Utilising a case study design in the Gauteng Province of South Africa, this study explores the perceptions of ECD practitioners regarding the professionalisation of the ECD sector. With a purposive sample of fifteen ECD practitioners teaching children aged between birth and four years this study sought to find out what is exactly happening in the sector regarding the birth of the new qualification for ECD teachers in the South African education system; which attempts to standardise a B.Ed. curriculum for new teachers in the ECD sector. Adopting the Uncertainty Reduction Theory (URT) as a lens, the study revealed that the Government and the Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) were not giving adequate support to the sector while parents viewed ECD centres as places of play and sleep rather than educational. The study concludes that the ECD sector is indispensable for the South African Education system to perform on par with other world countries and recommends that everyone; not only government; should come to the party to fix this challenge of the education system.Early Childhood EducationMEdUnrestricte
The influence of teacher professional identity on teaching number concepts in the foundation phase
No full textA thesis submitted in fulfillment of the academic requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Foundations of Education in the Faculty of Education, University of Zululand, 2022.There seems to be a lack of quality teaching of number concepts in the foundation phase. This lack of quality teaching is reflected in the continued poor learner performance. While there have been several programmes designed by the Department of Education to support Foundation Phase teachers, none seem to be achieving desired results. This study sought to find out the influence of teacher professional identity on teaching number concepts in the foundation phase. Twelve foundation phase teachers from the Johannesburg East District were purposively selected. Data was collected using in-depth interview schedule and observation tool and analysed thematically. The findings reveal that teachers view themselves as pedagogical content knowledge specialists, among others. However, there was lack of synergy between the way teachers teach number concepts and the self-image. The self-image was not reflected in their teaching. I concluded that teacher professional identity has an influence on teaching number concepts in the foundation phase. Teacher professional identity also provides a structure for teachers to construct their own thoughts and actions, and understand their positions in the wider communities they teach in. Teacher professional identity is not something that is fastened securely in a position, nor is it imposed. Rather it is acquired through encounter and the sense that is made of that encounter. I recommend that teachers consider investing in the development of their teacher professional identity because teachers teach their identities
Country risk analysis: an application of logistic regression and neural networks
Full text linkA research report submitted to the Faculty of Science, School of Statistics and Actuarial Science in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, University of the Witwatersrand. Johannesburg, 08 June 2017.
Mathematical
Statistics degree, 2017Country risk evaluation is a crucial exercise when determining the ability of
countries to repay their debts. The global environment is volatile and is filled
with macro-economic, financial and political factors that may affect a country’s
commercial environment, resulting in its inability to service its debt. This re
search report compares the ability of conventional neural network models and
traditional panel logistic regression models in assessing country risk. The mod
els are developed using a set of economic, financial and political risk factors
obtained from the World Bank for the years 1996 to 2013 for 214 economies.
These variables are used to assess the debt servicing capacity of the economies
as this has a direct impact on the return on investments for financial institu
tions, investors, policy makers as well as researchers. The models developed
may act as early warning systems to reduce exposure to country risk.
Keywords: Country risk, Debt rescheduling, Panel logit model, Neural net
work modelsXL201
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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