Incentives for Increased Graduate Enrollments: Incentive Types and Implementation Strategies

Institutions seeking to increase graduate enrollment consider incentivizing program growth. This report outlines ways that institutions allow graduate programs to keep surplus revenue, including tuition rebates, funding proportional to credit-hours, and decreased tax rates. It also examines scholarship programs created to increase admitted graduate student yield, new program offerings, and ongoing unit review.

Impacts of Graduate Student Enrollment Increases

As graduate schools seek to increase enrollment, faculty and staff must consider the impacts of enrollment increases on program curricula, faculty workloads, and course delivery methods. This brief examines how other institutions prepare for and implement increases in graduate enrollment. More specifically, the report reviews how graduate enrollment goals and rates impact faculty workloads, program curriculum and course delivery methods.

Managing Graduate Enrollments Graduate Enrollment Roles and Responsibilities

For the vast majority of colleges and universities, financial sustainability depends on maintaining or growing enrollment. Enrollment management discussions at the graduate level require a clear division of responsibilities among faculty and staff. This report examines how graduate school deans, enrollment management staff, and graduate program directors collaborate to meet enrollment goals.

An assessment of criteria to evaluate the graduate education program in Brazil

This study sought to identify criteria adequate for the evaluation of graduate programs in Brazil. A survey was the means for collecting the ratings and rankings given by faculty members at selected Brazilian graduate programs. A questionnaire using Likerttype and ranking items asked the importance attributed by each respondent to each of the 109 items listed. The data analysis reported in this dissertation indicates that the most highly rated criteria and indicators were: (1) Library: current periodicals; (2) Facilities: classrooms and laboratories; (3) Library: books and monographs; (4) Academic Environment: discussion, investigation, and expression; and (5) Facilities: research space and equipment. The study presents the means and standard deviations obtained for each indicator and also includes some figures obtained for a relational analysis. This dissertation was developed to provide useful information to educational planners, policy makers, administrators, and evaluators involved in Brazilian higher education or comparative studies. It is suggested that additional investigations concentrate on more specific and in-depth analysis and interpretation of the policymaking processes, i.e., on the study of social facts or organizational and academic variables in their relationships with aspects of the educational system. The appendices section includes a facsimile of the questionnaire and additional data.

BlueFriends: measuring, analyzing and preventing social exclusion between elementary school students

Social exclusion is a relatively recent term, whose creation is attributed to René Lenoir(Lenoir, 1974). Its concept covers a remarkably wide range of social and economic problems, and can be triggered for various reasons: mentally and physically handicapped, abused children, delinquents, multi-problem households, asocial people, and other social “misfits” (Silver, 1995, pp. 63; Foucault, 1992). With an increasingly multi-cultural population, cultural and social inequalities rapidly ascend, bringing with them the need for educational restructuring. We are living in an evermore diverse world, and children need to be educated to be receptive to the different types of people around them, especially considering social and cultural aspects. It is with these goals that inclusive education has seen an increased trend in today’s academic environment, reminding us that even though children may be taught under the same roof, discriminatory practices might still happen. There are, however, a number of developed tools to assess the various dimensions of social networks. These are mostly based on questionnaires and interviews, which tend to be fastidious and don’t allow for longitudinal, large scale measurement. This thesis introduces BlueFriends, a Bluetooth-based measurement tool for social inclusion/exclusion on elementary school classes. The main goals behind the development of this tool were a) understanding how exclusion manifests in students’ behaviors, and b) motivating pro-social behaviors on children through the use of a persuasive technology. BlueFriends is a distributed application, comprised by an application running on several smartphones, a web-hosted database and a computer providing a visual representation of the data collected on a TV screen, attempting to influence children behaviors. The application makes use of the Bluetooth device present on each phone to continuously sample the RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) from other phones, storing the data locally on each phone. All of the stored data is collected, processed and then inserted into the database at the end of each day. At the beginning of each recess, children are reminded of how their behaviors affect others with the help of a visual display, which consists of interactions between dogs. This display illustrates every child’s best friends, as well as which colleagues they don’t interact with as much. Several tips encouraging social interaction and inclusiveness are displayed, inspiring children to change their behaviors towards the colleagues they spend less time with. This thesis documents the process of designing, deploying and analyzing the results of two field studies. On the first study, we assess how the current developed tools are inferior to our measuring tool by deploying a measurement only study, aimed at perceiving how much information can be obtained by the BlueFriends application and attempting to understand how exclusion manifests itself in the school environment. On the second study, we pile on the previous to try and motivate pro-social behaviors on students, with the use of visual cues and recommendations. Ultimately, we confirm that our measurement tool’s results were satisfying towards measuring and changing children’s behaviors, and conclude with our thoughts on possible future work, suggesting a number of possible extensions and improvements.

Alfabetizar letrando: investigação-ação fundada nas necessidades de formação docente

The accomplished researches in the education field focus on the importance of the accomplishment of actions involved in the analysis of the needs to graduate teachers as a way to adequate to socialcultural changing that require more and more a creative activity to prepare teachers in their graduation perspective. The worry with a fail at school linked to public school students lead us to make this thesis which goals are: investigate the needs of the graduation of teachers at public Elementary Schools concerning to the subjacent knowledge to the development of a pedagogic practice of alphabetizing with literacy and (re)create, with some teachers as active participants in the researches, knowledge regarding the process of alphabetization with literacy , based on the graduation of teachers. The study was accomplished in a municipal Elementary School in the Ceará-Mirim city, located in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, which offers both I and II levels of the Elementary School, 7 teachers and the principal of the school were subjects of our researches. The starting point was the needs of the graduation as subject phenomena, socially created and that allow people to be aware of the goals of a graduation. The investigative broach is qualitative, whose fundamental purpose is the understanding of the meanings, symbols, values and intentions of the mankind actions, as regards to other humanbeing and the contexts in which they interact. Within this context, we chose the investigation-action for we consider this kind of research a place for investigation and professional graduation, in which teachers and the researcher herself assume responsibility of problematizing, build the needs of graduation and think about their practices. As proceedings to create and analyze data, we developed participant observations during the activities in classroom; semi-structured interviews (individual and in groups) with teachers and the principal; analysis of documents and meetings at school for reflexive studies that enabled us to gather data in a pyramidal panoramic view and analyze the contents. The research revealed that the analysis of necessities to graduate teachers is a resource able to contribute to the planning of projects of keeping on graduating more properly, and thus create a critical and reflexive identity for teachers. This way, it was possible the graduation necessities could be revealed and also the knowledge of teachers as regards to alphabetization inserted in a perspective of literacy. Nowadays, conceptualized needs upon difficulties of teachers, there is a tendency to translate them into theorization of problems, without application to these knowledge of teachers, as well as their wishes for changing, especially when those needs are built to analyze and consider concrete practices. Therefore, the graduation experiences have enabled the abandon of a mechanical broach for teaching reading and writing. It has also lead teachers to assume a posture of providing their students the understanding about the reading and writing processes and their functions as social instruments. The graduation theme contents allowed the knowledge to conceive reading and writing in new perspectives, according to their social functions, so that they can improve the education with literacy quality. This theoretical construction has enabled us to understand and consider the necessities of the graduation as progressive process, and has given us the possibility of re-think our own learning processes at the university and review the pedagogical practices of public school teachers. Our conclusion is that once teachers consider their own graduation needs, it contributes to change their concepts and practices in education and literacy, even though there used to be many difficulties in their graduation and organization of the pedagogical work

Formação continuada e representação social: implicações para a educação inclusiva

This study is part of the line of research on Teacher Education, circumscribed to the Graduate Program in Education of Federal University Rio Grande do Norte. In it, we have a qualitative research, whose object returned to the influence of continued education in social representation of inclusive education of Elementary School teachers. The same was done in an Elementary School of Cruzeiro do Sul city (Brasil/Acre) and performed with the participation of 11 teachers. We assume that thinking a continuing education inclusive presupposes reflect on the redefinition and resignification of practices undertaken by the teacher. Therefore, the teacher education is conceived as a continuum in which the teacher will be graduating in forming, shaping their way of being in social situations. We argue that in the context of interactions, we are going to reconstruct social representations that guide actions and attitudes about the objects that have meaning for the group. It was with the aim of identify the influence of these social representations and at the same time submit a proposal for continuing training in structured formative needs teachers who made use of collaborative action research. Since we believe that this can either meet the assumptions of a research and vocational training to enable that researcher and other teachers, collectively, problematizing situations of practice and, at the same time able to intervene in the same it. As procedures for obtaining information and analysis of the data, we performed, respectively, semi-structured interviews (individual and collective); reflective studies sessions and the analysis of content. The path of research revealed two social representations integrated one of inclusive education and another for student with disabilities. We noticed that although the teachers criticize the character sealed and limited of continued education courses that have frequented, reveal social representations of inclusive education and students with disabilities based on theories and concepts originated from such courses. As a result, represent inclusive education as an "education for all" and student with disabilities as someone "abnormal, different, but able to learn something . It is possible to state that from the moment the teachers approched theories about the principles of inclusive education and on the possibilities of student with disabilities took new discourses, and showed signs of change in the social representations before presented. In addition, we evidenced in this production that a proposal for training within the school, fomented by the needs teachers and having as methodology to collaborative action research, provides the (re)construction of collective knowledges and practices, sharing of experiences, hopes, discoveries and concerns and the development of cooperation and attitude for the (re)development of strategies to overcome the difficulties present in everyday teaching

Autoria e escrita: uma reflexão acerca do autorar em memórias de leituras de alunos de 9º ano do ensino fundamental

This paper presents results concerning studies conducted during the master's research in the area of Applied Linguistics of the Graduate Program in Language Studies - PPgEL, linked to the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. We approached this study the question of authorship, which has gained ground increasingly important in academic research, because the act of authoring, in view of the amount of circulating discourses socially, becomes increasingly questionable. We understand authorship as related to a positioning of the subject than to take responsibility, in the Bakhtinian sense, by its text, it makes their views, ideologies, beliefs and values, from ownership and restructuring of the speech of others. This research is methodologically inserted in a qualitative, interpretive in nature and has a corpus analysis of the ten productions written memoir genre of readings produced by students in 9th grade in elementary school. Research aimed to analyze the students' written productions held in the school environment, to identify these texts marks or evidence of authorship and investigate how the restructuring of ownership and voices of others in the process of authoring. We adopt a concept of language from bakhitinianas concepts and understand the text in a vision Geraldiana. The analyzes in this study showed that in most texts there is the strong presence of voices of others, either implicitly and/or explicit. That is, students, to build their sayings, if embraced the voices of others in various formats, in particular styles, namely, by what Bakhtin names as linear style and pictorial style. Some proved his statement highlighting their positions through direct quotes from authors of books, family, teachers, showing us that their voices are filled with voices of others with whom they approve, deny, analyze, think and reflect. We therefore conclude that students were constituted as subjects of their texts, authors, since they leave marked the voices of others so presentified and restructured voices of others who do not actually sounded like voices of others, but as present voices from a discursive restructuring producer

Mapping of composite hadrons into elementary hadrons and effective hadronic Hamiltonians

A mapping technique is used to derive in the context of constituent quark models effective Hamiltonians that involve explicit hadron degrees of freedom. The technique is based on the ideas of mapping between physical and ideal Fock spaces and shares similarities with the quasiparticle method of Weinberg. Starting with the Fock-space representation of single-hadron states, a change of representation is implemented by a unitary transformation such that composites are redescribed by elementary Bose and Fermi field operators in an extended Fock space. When the unitary transformation is applied to the microscopic quark Hamiltonian, effective, hermitian Hamiltonians with a clear physical interpretation are obtained. Applications and comparisons with other composite-particle formalisms of the recent literature are made using the nonrelativistic quark model. (C) 1998 Academic Press.

Elementary particles under the lens of the black holes

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Indoor air quality assessment of elementary schools in Curitiba, Brazil

The promotion of good indoor air quality in schools is of particular public concern for two main reasons: (1) school-age children spend at least 30% of their time inside classrooms and (2) indoor air quality in urban areas is substantially influenced by the outdoor pollutants, exposing tenants to potentially toxic substances. Two schools in Curitiba, Brazil, were selected to characterize the gaseous compounds indoor and outdoor of the classrooms. The concentrations of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and the isomers xylenes (BTEX); NO2; SO2; O3; acetic acid (HAc); and formic acid (HFor) were assessed using passive diffusion tubes. BTEX were analyzed by gas chromatography-ion trap mass spectrometry and other collected gasses by ion chromatography. The concentration of NO2 varied between 9.5 and 23 μg m-3, whereas SO2 showed an interval from 0.1 to 4.8 μg m-3. Within the schools, BTEX concentrations were predominant. Formic and acetic acids inside the classrooms revealed intermediate concentrations of 1.5 μg m-3 and 1.2 μg m-3, respectively. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009.

The gyromagnetic factor of elementary particles and non-minimal coupling

In this work we investigate a possible magnetic moment generation for massive neutral particles with spins-1 and -2 coupled non-minimally, in a specific way, to an external electromagnetic field. It is found that, in the nonrelativistic limit, these particles present g = 1. This result, worked out in the framework of Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, seems to suggest that g = 1 for all massive and neutral particles of any spin ≤ 2. We also compare with the results obtained for massive charged particles of spins-1 and -2, in the same regime (nonrelativistic), in order to investigate the role played by the spin separetely from the charge. Copyright © owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.

Escrever na escola: o trabalho pedagógico e a formação de alunos escritores

Pós-graduação em Educação - IBRC