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 Disability service use and academic outcomes for college students with disabilities(2020) Blasey, Julia; Wang, Cixin; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite the availability of disability support services, college students with disabilities continue to face poorer academic outcomes than their peers without disabilities. Over 70 percent of eligible college students with disabilities do not disclose their disability to their campus disability service to receive academic accommodations or supports. Among those who do utilize accommodations and supports, findings have been mixed regarding the relation between service use and students’ academic outcomes. However, few studies have examined timing of registration with disability service and use of services over time. The current study used secondary data to examine the relation between time of disability service registration and length of accommodation use on the academic outcomes of undergraduate students with disabilities (N= 1,980) who used accommodations between fall 2015 and spring 2019. Descriptive analyses showed overall strong academic outcomes, with a mean GPA of 3.10 and a six-year graduation rate of 82.7 percent. Students delayed an average of 2.38 semesters before registering with the disability service and used their accommodations for an average of 3.23 semesters. Differences in academic outcomes and accommodation use patterns are discussed with regard to gender, race/ethnicity, and disability type. As hypothesized, multiple regression analyses revealed that delayed registration with the disability service negatively predicted cumulative GPA and positively predicted time to graduation. Similarly, length of accommodation use positively predicted cumulative GPA and negatively predicted time to graduation. Results of the multilevel model regression with fixed effects showed that continued accommodation use positively predicted within-subject changes in students’ semester GPAs across the eight semesters of the study period. Implications for future research and for improving service delivery for university disability offices are discussed.Item MEASURING PEER EFFECTS IN ACADEMIC OUTCOMES(2017) Zeng, Ying; Kuersteiner, Guido M; Prucha, Ingmar R; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There is wide belief that a student's behavior and academic outcome are affected by her/his fellow students. This peer effect lies at the center of the debate about education policy. My dissertation focuses on measuring peer effects in academic outcomes. It consists of a theoretical part and an empirical part. In the theoretical part, I study a peer effects model with group-wise equal interactions and random group effects. Identifying peer effects is notoriously challenging due to the reflection problem. Common shocks to the groups also generate spurious peer effects. My model, therefore, controls for the common shocks to the whole group with random group effects. My estimation strategy overcomes the identification problem with spatial econometrics techniques. I develop a quasi-maximum likelihood estimator of the model. Monte-Carlo simulations show that the bias of the estimator decreases with the number of groups and the variation in group size, and increases with group size. Finally, I prove the consistency and asymptotic normality of the estimator under standard assumptions. In the empirical part, I apply the model to Project STAR data to study the peer effects among kindergarten students. Peers constitute an important context for children's academic development. This empirical study measures peer effects on math and reading scores of kindergarten children using data from Project STAR, an experiment in Tennessee that randomly assigned both children and teachers to classrooms of different sizes. It estimates the impact of peers’ scores and characteristics on children’s individual scores, controlling among other things for random class effects. In contrast to most existing studies, the estimated peer effects in the empirical part are small and insignificant. The results are robust when allowing peer effects to be heterogeneous by gender, using data from higher grades or considering alternative specifications. The findings of the empirical study cast doubt on the effectiveness of programs that manipulate peer groups for better educational outcomes.