Counseling, Higher Education & Special Education Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2757
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Item NEIGHBORHOOD STRUCTURE AND ACADEMIC SELF CONCEPT: A MULTILEVEL MODEL(2011) Pickering, Cyril Emmanuel; Strein, William; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There is a robust correlation between a student's academic achievement and his/her academic self concept. Various contextual variables, such as the school population's average academic ability, have been shown to have an effect on academic self-concept and on the relationship between self-concept and measured achievement. Community variables can have an effect on a student's academic achievement, though the relationship with academic self-concept is not well established. Urbanicity of the environment is a variable of interest, as there are various ways to describe and measure a neighborhood, though there is still a question about what makes a neighborhood urban. This study seeks to measure urbanicity and uses this urbanicity variable in a multilevel model, estimating the direct effects of the context on academic self-concept and explores the possibility that urbanicity modifies the relationship between self-concept and other student variables. Analysis revealed that neighborhood variables had no significant relationship with self-conceptItem Effect of Instructional Consultation on Academic Achievement in Third Through Fifth Grade(2011) Maslak, Kristi Samantha; Strein, William; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The present study evaluated the effect of Instructional Consultation (Rosenfield, 1995) on the academic achievement of third through fifth grade students. Students whom teachers did (n = 201) and did not (n = 8119) select as the focus of consultation were balanced on their estimated propensity to be selected using logistic regression of observed covariates. Multilevel modeling compared students in the two treatment conditions on teacher assigned grades and standardized measures of reading and math, net of prior achievement. A small, but statistically significant negative effect of the program (d = -.13) was found for standardized measures of math. No significant differences were found on the other outcome measures. Limitations include model misspecification, missing data, and treatment diffusion.