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 Addressing the Hispanic Dropout Crisis: Predicting the Educational Persistence of Mexican-Descent Students Using Demographic and Process Variables(2008-12-18) DiPaula, John Joseph; Lucas, Margaretha S; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT While there has been a concerted effort to close the achievement gap and decrease school dropout rates for more than 30 years, Hispanic students are still dropping out of school at two and a half times the rate of black students, four times the rate of white students and almost eight times the rate of Asian students (Kaufman, Alt & Chapman, 2002). The Hispanic dropout crisis has been recognized as a national problem and was addressed by the federal government through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, through its focus on closing the racial gap in graduation rates. Regrettably, data continues to suggest that this situation is not improving (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). A more thorough understanding of the relationship between race/ethnicity and educational persistence is necessary to help create policies and practices to increase Hispanic graduation rates and close the graduation gap. Investigating deeper into this issue of Hispanics drop out, census data disaggregated by national origin, reveal that there are strong differences between nationalities and that Mexicans have the lowest rate of educational attainment among all Hispanic groups (U.S. Census Bureau, 2004). Due to the disparity in performance within the larger Hispanic population, this study will focus on the sub-group with the lowest educational attainment and highest drop out rate, Mexican youth. The purpose of this study is to investigate those input and process variables that may be influenced by school personnel in order to help increase Mexican-descent students' ability to persist in school toward graduation. The current study, in essence, will contribute to a better understanding of students' social support from adults at school (social capital) and the effect this has on students' educational expectations, attendance and persistence. The current study utilizes the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002/2004 (ELS:2002/2004) dataset sponsored by NCES.Item The Effects of Critical Thinking Pedagogy During the Ninth Grade on High School Dropout(2005-03-01) Boccanfuso, Christopher Michael; Martin, Steven P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper tests existing educational theory regarding the effectiveness of interactive pedagogy in order to determine the predictive ability of interactive pedagogy during ninth grade math and English classes towards graduation. This is done using a mixed methods approach which examines correlations between student teacher interaction and dropout through logistic regression models using data from the Philadelphia Educational Longitudinal Study (PELS), and qualitatively links interactive methods examined in the quantitative section (and some not examined) to pedagogy the sample of Philadelphia ninth-grade students find effective. Quantitative results provide strong evidence that low student-teacher interaction predicts a higher probability of dropout, as well as make suggestive connections between interactive methods and graduation. The qualitative results link both the non-interactive methods as part of the "pedagogy of poverty" and in-class discussion to pedagogy which students find effective in creating attachment to school, confirming the quantitative findings. Implications for educational theory are discussed.