Counseling, Higher Education & Special Education
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2226
The departments within the College of Education were reorganized and renamed as of July 1, 2011. This department incorporates the former departments of Counseling & Personnel Services; Education Leadership, Higher Education & International Education (excluding Organizational Leadership & Policy Studies); and Special Education.
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Item Understanding Teacher Stress: Relations of Implicit and Explicit Coping Processes with Teaching Outcomes(2017) Kim, Margaret Jordan; Teglasi, Hedwig; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Teacher attrition within the first three years is a growing problem in the US. The current study focuses on teacher stress from a novel perspective by assessing how teachers cope with stresses of the profession at the earliest point in their careers – during their training. Coping is defined as a transaction between a person and their environment, influenced by conscious choices and automatic processes. Research relies on explicit measures (self-report on Likert scales) to assess coping, but critics note this approach is limited and does not assess the whole process. In addition to Likert scales, this study incorporates implicit measures (narratives, the Thematic Apperception Test), to examine the implicit processes of coping. As predicted, significant correlations were identified within, but not across methods of measurement. Implicit but not explicit measures were significantly correlated with external evaluations of teacher effectiveness. Implications for coping theory and measurement are discussed.Item The Distribution of Gender Differences in the Temperament and Social Competence of Preschoolers(2014) Schussler, Laura Elizabeth; Teglasi, Hedwig; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The literature has shown gender differences on many temperament and social competence (SC) measures, though there are gaps in understanding where differences lie and whether it varies by informant. This study investigated how temperament relates to SC and whether gender is a moderator. Rater source and the use of standardized versus raw scores and how they influence gender as a moderator was a main focus. Temperament was measured by the CBQ (Putnam & Rothbart, 2006) and the newly-developed CBQ, Teacher Form (CBQ-T; Teglasi, Schussler, & Gifford, under review). SC was measured by the SCBE (LaFreniere & Dumas, 1992), and all measures were administered to the parents and teachers of preschoolers (N = 113; M age = 57 months). For temperament, findings supported the fact that rater agreement is low and holds true for both genders. On the temperament scales on which parents significantly differed from teachers, parents tended to rate boys more favorably than teachers. The hypothesis that teacher ratings would yield more gender differences than parents was supported. There were also more differences in variability between genders for teacher ratings, revealing that teachers tended to provide more extreme ratings. Scales with distributional differences were ones that have consistently yielded gender differences. For SC, girls had significantly higher means on several scales with raw scores, and raw scores produced more temperament x gender interactions for parent ratings. Activity Level and Anger had opposite effects for gender with higher activity predicting higher SC for girls and lower SC for boys, and higher anger predicting higher SC for boys and lower SC for girls. On Sadness, there were opposite rater effects with Sadness positively associated with SC for parents and negatively associated for teachers. There were fewer gender differences for teachers when considering correlations of temperament and SC. Overall, findings support the importance of obtaining information from parents and teachers about children's temperament and SC. Moreover, these results suggest that raw SC scores are more useful than standard scores for studying relations between SC and temperament, particularly with parent raters. Shortcomings included a limited sample precluding full examination of distributional differences.Item Elementary Teachers' Grading Practices: Does the Reality Reflect the Rubric?(2011) Shanahan, Katherine Bruckman; Gottfredson, Gary D; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Report cards are the primary way that teachers, students, and parents communicate about student achievement in the classroom. Although many school districts develop rubrics to guide teacher grading practices, most research finds that in reality, grades represent a hodgepodge of factors that vary across teachers and across school systems. The current study investigates student factors that explain variance in elementary report card grades in a suburban school district. The sample includes 4th and 5th grade students (N = 8,555) and their classroom teachers (N = 374) from 45 schools. Multilevel structural equation models, with students nested within classrooms, tested two models describing variance in report card grades. One model included the factors listed on the school system grading rubric along with additional factors thought to be related to grades (non-rubric model). An alternative, nested, model included only the factors from the grading rubric (rubric model). Results suggested that the non-rubric model provided a better fit for the data, but effects for the additional non-rubric factors were uniformly small.Item THE MEASUREMENT OF SCHOOL CLIMATE USING SURVEYS: EXPLORING UNIT OF ANALYSIS(2009) Burkhouse, Katie Lynn Sutton; Gottfredson, Gary D; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)School climate researchers have used different units of analysis when assessing school climate features. Overall, there is little research available to understand how different levels of analysis, individual or aggregated, influence the psychometric properties of a survey instrument. The purpose of the current research was to explore the use of different unit of analysis choices in instrument development. Further, the present study sought to replicate findings that the wording of survey instruments may influence the conceptualization of school climate by survey informants. Results indicate that unit of analysis affects on the factor structure, but that there is some overlap in the factors that emerge. Further, the present research confirmed past findings that the wording of climate items appears to affect the perception of items by respondents. Limitations and future directions are discussed. Unit of analysis remains an important theoretical and methodological concept in school climate research.