Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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2011 - 20152

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Author: search.filters.author.Pickering, Cyril EmmanuelSubject: search.filters.subject.Education

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    STUDENT RESILIENCY: A MIXED METHODS ANALYSIS OF COUNSELING GROUP EFFECTS.
    (2015) Pickering, Cyril Emmanuel; Strein, William; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Student resiliency, or the internal resources that an individual possesses that enables success despite adversity, is a variable of interest, particularly for students who are at-risk for negative outcomes in school. This study examined the group counseling efforts of an alternative high school, looking at how group composition influenced the growth in scores on the Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents, a measure of student resiliency that students were given at the beginning and end of the year. In addition to this quantitative analysis, students who participated in the groups and counselors who facilitated the groups were interviewed regarding the effectiveness and challenges of the groups, as well as how the groups impacted Sense of Mastery, Sense of Relatedness and Emotional Reactivity, the three areas of resiliency that were being measured. Each interviewee provided feedback regarding ways that the groups could help students grow in resilience. Results from the quantitative analysis indicated the aggregated starting resiliency scores of the other group members had no impact on a student’s growth in any of the resiliency scales. A second analysis revealed some correlations between group growth in resiliency and a student’s growth in resiliency, seemingly indicating that as the group improves in certain measures, individual growth is hindered. Results from the qualitative analysis revealed overall positive impressions of the group counseling experience and statements about how the groups helped improve resiliency. Several common themes among students and counselors emerged regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the group counseling approach. Implications for implementation and evaluation of group counseling are discussed.
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    NEIGHBORHOOD STRUCTURE AND ACADEMIC SELF CONCEPT: A MULTILEVEL MODEL
    (2011) Pickering, Cyril Emmanuel; Strein, William; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    There is a robust correlation between a student's academic achievement and his/her academic self concept. Various contextual variables, such as the school population's average academic ability, have been shown to have an effect on academic self-concept and on the relationship between self-concept and measured achievement. Community variables can have an effect on a student's academic achievement, though the relationship with academic self-concept is not well established. Urbanicity of the environment is a variable of interest, as there are various ways to describe and measure a neighborhood, though there is still a question about what makes a neighborhood urban. This study seeks to measure urbanicity and uses this urbanicity variable in a multilevel model, estimating the direct effects of the context on academic self-concept and explores the possibility that urbanicity modifies the relationship between self-concept and other student variables. Analysis revealed that neighborhood variables had no significant relationship with self-concept