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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    "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.
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    A Comparative Study of Cognitive and Non-cognitive Factors Relationship to Academic Success For Foreign Master's Students
    (2004-04-30) Stephenson, Lisa Ann; Schmidtlein, Frank; Education Policy, and Leadership
    This study examined ways to improve the predictability of academic success in the selection and admission procedures for foreign students, compared to U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The population consisted of students who enrolled in master's degree programs in the fall semesters of 1995, 1996 and 1997 at the University of Maryland, College Park. Of the 3,275 students, 595 were considered to be foreign students, 118 were permanent residents and 2,544 were U.S. citizens. The study examined literature dealing with academic success to determine the degree to which selected cognitive and noncognitive variables were related to academic success for foreign students. Ten predictor variables were selected to determine their relationship to four measures of academic success. The measures of academic success were graduate grade point average, total number of semesters taken to complete the degree, total number of credits completed by graduation, and the likelihood of completing the master's degree. Data were obtained from the Office of Institutional Research and Planning. This study did not find a relationship between the GMAT and GRE scores and foreign student academic success. There also appeared to be no significant relationship between TOEFL total mean scores and academic success. There was a significant relationship between gender and academic success. Age did not appear to have a significant effect on academic success of foreign students, but there was a relationship between age and academic success for U.S. citizens and permanent residents. A number of differences were found in academic success related to field of study. There appeared to be relationships between students' country of origin and their academic achievement. In addition, a significantly positive effect was found between financial support from the University and academic success. Full-time enrollment also had a positive effect on academic success for permanent residents and U.S. citizens, but no effect on academic success for foreign students. No significant relationship was found between changing majors and academic success. Additional studies are suggested to confirm the findings, and the research methodology should be expanded to include a qualitative approach to further understand factors contributing to foreign student academic success.