UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item "This Makes me Who I Am": The Meaning and Significance of School Membership for Ninth Grade Students Transitioning to High School(2009) Boccanfuso, Christopher Michael; Lucas, Jeffrey; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the motivational aspects of academic engagement from a social-psychological perspective by introducing the concept of school membership as a mediating factor between academic environment and the behaviors that comprise academic engagement. School membership is rooted in identity theory and is defined as the possession of social bonds with a social network of school members through which a highly salient self-identity and high levels of commitment as a member of the school are internalized. In order to identify links between academic environment, school membership, and academic engagement, I qualitatively examine disadvantaged students within "City High", a school employing the Talent Development High School Model, a comprehensive school reform model with that creates an environment conducive to the internalization of school membership. Using ethnographic methods, I compare and contrast school membership levels and perceptions of in and out of school environment within a diverse group of students at "City High". In order to test my qualitative findings on a broad scale, I quantitatively examine links between academic environment, school membership, and academic engagement through multilevel modeling techniques, using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002. Both the qualitative and quantitative portions of this dissertation provide suggestive results indicating both the presence of school membership within disadvantaged students with high levels of academic performance and effort. In addition, both phases of this project indicate that students' social and structural academic environment were related to the creation and maintenance of school membership. This dissertation concludes by examining the ways in which comprehensive school reform models benefit by focusing on students who are transitioning to high school and placing the creation of a "culture of success" on par with raising student achievement levels, as these goals are intertwined.Item Making the Most of Extra Time: The Role of Classroom Factors and Family Socioeconomic Status on Full-Day Kindergartners' Reading Achievement and Academic Engagement(2007-11-19) Rathbun, Amy Hanley; Croninger, Robert G; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation used nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) to explore relationships between full-day kindergarten classroom factors, family socioeconomic status (SES), and public school children's gains in reading achievement and academic engagement over their first formal year of schooling. Specifically, the study focused on two aspects of kindergarten classroom factors that could maximize the additional time provided by full-day programs: instructional resources (i.e., class size and instructional aides) and instructional practices (i.e., time allocation across subject areas, grouping strategies, and instructional skills and activities). Two-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses (i.e., full-day kindergartners nested within public schools) were conducted to investigate the effects of school-averaged classroom factors on children's reading and academic engagement gains over the kindergarten year, as well as possible effects of school- averaged classroom factors on the relationship between children's SES and the aforementioned outcomes. The study identified multiple classroom factors associated with overall differences in full-day kindergartners' average reading gains. Specifically, results suggested that increases in reading instructional time, decreases in class size, and a balance in the frequency of discrete literacy skills and comprehension-based skills could help to accelerate reading gains during the kindergarten year. This study did not find evidence to support concerns that full-day kindergarten programs might harm children's academic engagement because of an overemphasis on academics. Instead, full-day kindergartners' academic engagement tended to remain constant across the kindergarten year and did not vary in relation to most instructional practices. Results indicated that full-day kindergartners demonstrated increased academic engagement in schools that had instructional aides working at least one hour per day with kindergartners. This study also found that the effects of family SES did not vary between schools, so average classroom resources and practices did not influence differentially the reading achievement gains or the academic engagement gains of students from different SES backgrounds. In sum, this dissertation helps to provide some of the first evidence on how full-day kindergarten programs might structure instructional resources and time-related instructional practices in ways that increase children's reading achievement and academic engagement.