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The purpose of the study was to examine if there was a significant difference between first-grade English Learners (EL) who constitute a majority (>50%) of the English language mainstream classroom (homogeneous grouping) and first-grade EL who constitute a minority (<50%) of the English language mainstream classrooms (heterogeneous grouping) in the area of English language acquisition as measured by the California English Language Development Test (CELDT). To accomplish this, the researcher gathered CELDT scores of entire English language mainstream EL who were enrolled in first grade for the ...

In the last two decades, a concern on how federal forests in the United States are managed has provoked concerns among different stakeholders, including NGOs. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of NGO influence on forest management legislation. Eight aspects were selected and compared in different study cases referring to legislative proposals dealing with forest management in order to define success criteria for a legislative initiative. The study indicates that the following criteria are particularly important to fulfill in order to influence forest management l...

The subtle nature of bias can cause leaders to be unaware of religiously based influences. The outcome can be both positive and negative. The leader can make decisions that are more effective by maximizing useful paradigms and constructs, or make less effective and inappropriate decisions through lack of evaluation of alternative approaches, data and responses. In either scenario, understanding one's internal nature is integral to maximizing one's leadership abilities. This qualitative study examined how United States commissioned and noncommissioned military leaders stationed in Europe descri...

This study investigated the characteristics and challenges of high-achieving second-generation Nigerian youths in the United States. An increasing number of youths in America's schools are from immigrant backgrounds due to the flow of immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Given the local and national mandates to improve the academic achievement of all children, we cannot afford to leave any group behind. Although research on immigrant children from Asia and Latin America and their adaptation and schooling has increased in the last two decades, the educational experiences of Black ...

This dissertation presents a study on the acquisition of telicity by Spanish and English native speakers. In addition to the study of acquisition, it investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of locatum constructions (e.g., the water filled the bucket), which are sentences that contain two internal arguments and whose subject is non-agentive. This dissertation explores the syntactic and semantic properties of elements of the verb phrase that had not been previously considered in the interpretation of telicity, such as the role of non-agentive subjects and the type of movement that tak...

Job satisfaction is one of the most researched topics in the field of industrial psychology. This dissertation is an examination of job satisfaction of international educators in the post-September 11th era. International educators have experienced immense change since September 11, including implementation of the Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) and the threat of global terrorism. As a result many international educators are contemplating early retirement or are leaving the field for different vocations. This study focuses on four different international educator groups: En...

Agent technology is a novel approach for the development of distributed systems. In particular, mobile agents can provide much greater flexibility and robustness than the traditional distributed system methodologies since they provide mobility from platform to platform. Thus, they form a vast area of research. One key problem faced by the mobile agent systems is security. A migrating agent can face many threats while migrating to a host/ agent platform. Similarly the platform can be maliciously affected by an agent. A number of different approaches have been suggested in the literature to deal...

Regional economies are highly dependent upon entrepreneurial endeavor success for growth, but the success rate for entrepreneurs is low (Gugliada, 2003). This quantitative group comparison research identified specific leadership characteristics that differentiated successful entrepreneurs from those starting entrepreneurial endeavors. Analysis of the research results revealed that an accepted contemporary leadership model might support programs targeting entrepreneurial success rate enhancement. A general study population of entrepreneurs in the western New York region limited the research sco...

The main purpose of this study is to demonstrate how new audiovisual media, such as YouTube, can be effectively combined with task-based teaching approaches for communicative language teaching at the advanced level. Based on an examination of prior research, this study generates a set of criteria which are essential to the development of task-based units that utilize authentic video material to increase students' cultural awareness and communicative skills. The proposed sample units serve as models for instructors to use the presented criteria for the creation of further language activities an...

Anaemia and malaria are two related problems of public health significance in malaria-endemic countries, including Ghana, that continue to impact negatively on pregnancy outcomes, despite interventions being put in place to address them. The reasons for the apparent lack of efficacy of routine iron supplementation in reducing the risks of preterm and other adverse pregnancy outcomes are not clearly established in Ghana. It is not also known whether all pregnant women benefit from iron supplementation and whether there are some other factors that limit the effectiveness of prenatal iron supplem...