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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    The Influences of Classroom Characteristics and Teacher-Student Relations on Student Academic Achievement
    (2009) Vu, Phuong Anna; Gottfredson, Gary D; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study examines close teacher-student relations, classroom characteristics, and interaction effects on student academic grades and standardizes achievement scores. Classroom characteristics including teacher instructional practices, class mean teacher-student relationships, and a classroom index of academic risk are evaluated for their influence on student achievement. The participants are 24,328 students (kindergarten through fifth grade) nested within 946 classrooms from 45 public schools in Virginia. Multilevel analysis tests the student- and classroom-level associations separately for each grade level. Results indicate that close teacher-student relations and teacher self-reported use of good instructional practices predicts positive student academic achievement. Interaction results indicate that the association between close teacher-student relations and student achievement is slightly stronger in classrooms with more academic risk, according to the models examined.
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    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.