Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemParent professional partnerships in IEP development : a case study of a MAPS process( 2007)The practices, language and behaviours which professionals adopt when they meet with parents prior to Individual Education Program (IEP) planning may have a significant effect on the attitudes and capabilities families bring to the educational setting. During this case study the adult family members of a child with additional needs were observed as they addressed the developmental and programming needs of their child by participating in the McGill Action Planning System (MAPS) and a subsequent Program Support Group (PSG) meeting. Themes indicating attitudes or perceptions that empowered the family towards continued participation in collaborative teams for IEP development emerged in the observational data and were defined through the methods of informant diaries and semi-structured interviews. Less dominant quantitative methods were used to verify that the participant's ongoing attitudes towards parent professional collaboration corroborated with the final themes of flexibility, unification, satisfaction and function.
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ItemPrimary teachers' practices in a demonstration school : the pedagogical uses of websites( 2007)The new communications technologies are the latest technological revolution to impact on education. Karl Marx pointed out it is not technology that shapes a social world, but the social arrangements that are required or adopted to implement it. But contrary to what I will argue, Marx and many others since have thought that there are an indeterminate number of social arrangements by which technology, defined in physical terms, can be implemented as an industrial or educational process by human beings with a history and traditions. The discussion points to the following principle: a website is transformed from a piece of stuff into a social object by its embodiment in staffroom narrative. In education the pattern of Internet use has the potential to change the professional identity formation, individually and collectively, of teachers who use it, so researching how the Internet is used helps in understanding the individual rationales that underpin some of the day to day choices teachers make that will shape the future of schooling. This study of the teachers' discursive practices, in an ICT demonstration school, seeks to understand their site practices in the context of this social responsibility. Each of the teachers has a pedagogical past or 'historical self' that acts as an agent on all they say and do in the community of practice. The differences in how teachers interpret and utilize Internet websites may reflect to what degree institutional practices and social rhetoric play an 'active' role in determining a teacher's classroom agency. Teaching with the new information technology should afford children not only access to new knowledge but the executive intelligence to form their own educational investigations. However, Wittgenstein has warned us against taking superficial models of where we are or what there is. In this study, everyday social talk, including social theory is full of grammatical substantives, but only those which refer to discursive acts are what they seem. The discursive exploration of specific social episodes that occur within a new socially constructed technological world of the primary school (Schatzki, 2002) enable us to understand the patterns of practice of the Purcell Primary School community and identify meanings that are constructed within. The data presented demonstrates how the six members of this teaching community make sense of their world; not only as individuals, but as members of both the broader team and a school community directly determines how they acquire 'shared meaning' within that community. The research identifies the self, of the teachers, as agents or patients (Harre, 1995) in the real world context of Purcell. For the teachers, collectively and individually, at Purcell, and teachers in the broader educational community, alike, understanding their psychological location in their own storylines in a complex local moral order that publicly embraces the new informational technology in the face of new institutional practices, has the potential to enhance their capacity and lead to a more technical and comprehensive fulfilment.
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ItemAnalysis of pupil achievement in the SACMEQ II mathematics assessment in Mauritius using the Rasch model( 2007)Educational reforms are brought about through policy decisions which should be based on sound information. To ensure that the policy decisions are realistic, the data collected by the test administered need to be valid and reliable. The SACMEQ II study was designed to enable policies to be made to improve achievement of pupils and at the same time to improve the conditions of learning in schools. In this study, an analysis of the data collected for the SACMEQ II pupil mathematics test in Mauritius has been carried out using the Rasch model. The reliability and validity of the test have been examined to assess the extent to which it measured the construct it was designed to test and to assess the quality of the items in the instrument. As the data collected have been used as indicators of the pupils' performances, a differential item functioning (DIF) analysis has been carried out to investigate whether the test was fair for the gender subgroups. The results show that the test is reliable and that there is evidence of a dominant underlying dimension in the construct being measured. A few of the items need to be omitted or reconsidered as they are showing poor fit and cannot discriminate adequately between low and high achievers. The results obtained from the analysis of the pupils' responses on these items could be useful to test developers as it might help in test item modification for future use. The results also show that there is no significant difference in the performance between gender and the DIF analysis indicate that both gender have responded to the items in the same way. It is suggested that a comparative study of the DIF results be carried out with other SACMEQ countries to find out if they follow a similar pattern. Overall, the study shows that the SACMEQ II pupil mathematics test has been successful in measuring the mathematics ability of grade six pupils in primary schools in Mauritius.