A Survey to Determine the Capacity Development Needs of Research Ethics Committee Administrators in South Africa

Most capacity development efforts for research ethics committees focus on committee members and little on ethics administrators. Increasing studies mandate the focus on administrators’ capacity development needs to enable adequate and effective committee support. This study investigated current responsibilities, training requirements, and administrator role needs. An online cross-sectional survey was conducted among administrators from 62 National Health Research Ethics Council-registered research ethics committees in South Africa. In total, 36 administrators completed the questionnaire. Results show that, in addition to administration, they perform managerial, review process and guidance-advisory tasks. Nearly 49% indicated only having received informal research ethics-related training, not targeted formal training, with 81% of the informal training being through workshops. Research ethics administrators’ responsibilities have evolved to complex tasks requiring targeted capacity development efforts.

Administrator Role Indicators for Encourage Efficiency on Learning Management in School: Confirmatory Factor Analysis

The present research was aimed to validate the construct validity of the administrator role indicators for encourage efficiency on learning management in school under the Office of the Basic Education Commission. A stratified random sampling method was used to select a sample of 150 school administrators under the Office of the Basic Education Commission. The research instrument used was a 5 rating scale questionnaire with content validity from 0.60-1.00. The data analyses were first order a confirmatory factor analysis. The results of the study indicated that the administrator role indicators for encourage efficiency on learning management in school under the Office of the Basic Education Commission comprised 15 indicators, is valid and fit to empirical data i.e. Chi-square = 87.675, degree of freedom (df) = 76, p-value = 0.170, GFI = 0.931, AGFI = 0.892, and RMSEA = 0.019.

Från studerande i pedagogik till forskningsledare i utbildningsvetenskap

The first part of the article reports a few daily reflections from my last years of work focusing the teacher role, the researcher role, the administrator role and the role of the teacher/researcher in third stream activities. The progress can be summarized quite negatively - less time dedicated to heterogeneous student groups, changing opportunities to achieve analytical and critical skills, increased governance in scientific achievements, reduced collegial "power" and reduced interest to be engaged in third stream activities. The second part of the article is about the relationship between education/pedagogy, didactics/curriculum studies and educational science. Didactics was discussed as part of improving research basis for prospective and active teachers. One conclusion is that more than fifteen years of discussion hardly favored the subject of education, but highlighted the importance of subject didactics. Another conclusion is that neither the introduction of educational science became the solution to research appeals for teachers and teacher education as originally thought. Accordingly, more than thirty years of discussion first about finding the relationship between pedagogy and didactics and then to clarify the relationship to educational science has hardly led to any illumination regarding the boundaries of the subject of education.

Student Bullying, Teacher Protection, and Administrator Role Ambiguity

This investigation examines the impact teacher protection and principal role ambiguity have on elementary school student bullying. Data were collected from 1,554 teachers and 198 campus administrators from 104 elementary schools in Texas. HLM analyses are employed to identify the effect that teacher protection, administrator role ambiguity, school size, and socioeconomic status have on student bullying. The findings indicate when teachers espouse a belief in protecting students from bullying and administrators clearly understand their roles, bullying incidents decrease. Thus, enhancing teacher protection and administrator role clarity may serve as useful tools to help educators reduce incidents of school bullying.