College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/8
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
Browse
4 results
Search Results
Item Reliability and Test Environment of the SCAN-A with Children Ages 12-15(2007-07-30) Spencer, Michele Lynn; Gordon-Salant, Sandra; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The SCAN-A is a widely utilized auditory processing screening tool for use with adolescents and adults 12-to-50 years of age. The SCAN-A consists of four subtests: Filtered Words, Auditory Figure-Ground, Competing Words, and Competing Sentences, and takes about 20 minutes to administer. Other versions of this screening tool exist (e.g., SCAN and SCAN-C) that are standardized for use with children under 12 years of age. However, previous reports indicate that test-retest reliability is poor and test environment affects performance by young children. In this study, the effect of test environment (sound attenuating booth versus quiet room) and test-retest reliability for the 12-to-15 year old age group was investigated. Thirty participants, ages 12-to-15 years old, who were normally developing, were tested using the SCAN-A four times, twice in both a quiet room and a sound attenuating booth, with testing in both environments conducted one month apart. A high false-positive rate (43% of participants) was found for the first administration of the SCAN-A, with fewer participants identified with possible APD with subsequent test administrations. Results revealed a significant main effect of test administration time, and no significant main effect of test environment or significant interaction, for the Filtered Words, Auditory Figure-Ground, Competing Words, and Total Test standard score. No significant main effects or interaction was found for the Competing Sentences subtest. This investigation demonstrates that the SCAN-A has low specificity, a high false-positive rate, and poor test-retest reliability.Item Essays on the Economics of Education(2007-05-31) Imberman, Scott Andrew; Duggan, Mark G; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Part I: Charter schools are publicly funded schools that, in exchange for expanded accountability, receive more autonomy and experience fewer regulations than traditional public schools. Previous work has found mixed evidence on the impacts of charter schools on both charter and non-charter students. However, these studies focus almost exclusively on test scores and may not fully account for endogenous movements of students and location of schools. Using data from an anonymous large urban school district, I investigate how charter schools affect both charter and non-charter students. In the first chapter I look at the effects of charter schools on charter students. I find that charter schools generate improvements in student behavior and attendance but the effects on test scores differ by subject. These results change little after correcting for selection based on changes in outcomes, endogenous attrition, or persistence. In the second chapter I investigate whether charters affect students who remain in non-charter schools. I find little evidence of charter school impacts on non-charter students. However I also find evidence that regressions using school fixed-effects may be biased. Changes in peer characteristics do not appear to play a large role in the charter impacts. Part II: Strains on the Federal budget have created worries that Federal funding of aid for higher education will fall in the future. If this happens, state governments will need to try to re-allocate their higher education spending more efficiently. One possible way to do this would be to shift funding away from public provision towards demand-side subsidies so that more students could attend private colleges. However, this will only work if private colleges provide benefits to students over public. In order to answer this question, I use highly detailed and rich data sets to assess whether there are benefits to attending private colleges over public ones. For males the wage return is small and statistically insignificant during their twenties but statistically significant at around 11 percentage points by their mid-thirties. For females the wage returns are negative and statistically insignificant. Both males and females exhibit increases in the likelihood of finishing a bachelor's degree.Item ESSAYS ON THE ECONOMICS OF EDUCATION(2006-05-01) WHALLEY, ALEXANDER; Smith, Jeffrey; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the first chapter I study racial differences in the impact of education on labor income volatility. Using panel data on black and white males from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics I find that education reduces labor income volatility more for blacks than for whites. The central specifications indicate that college graduation reduces transitory labor income volatility by more than 65 percent relative to high school dropouts for blacks, whereas whites receive no statistically significant reduction. I also find that more risk averse blacks obtain more education while more risk averse whites do not. I argue that these results imply: (1) that precautionary demand for human capital is quantitatively important; and (2) the black differential investment puzzle can be explained by accounting for racial differences in the impact of education on exposure to labor income volatility. The results can be explained by the precision of employer's beliefs about a worker's productivity increasing more with education for blacks, so that more-skilled blacks face less labor income volatility. Participants, like econometricians, may have difficulty in constructing the counterfactual outcome required to estimate the impact of a program. In this chapter, this question is directly assessed by examining the extent to which program participants are able to estimate their individual program impacts ex-post. Utilizing experimental data from the National Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) Study (NJS) experimentally estimated program impacts to individual self-reports of program effectiveness after the completion of the program are compared. Two methods are implemented to estimate the individual experimental impacts based on: (1) subgroup variation; (2) the assumption of perfect rank correlation in impacts. Little evidence of a relationship between the experimentally estimated program impacts and self-reported program effectiveness is found. There is evidence found that cognitively inexpensive potential proxies for program impacts such as before-after differences in earnings, the type of training received, and labor market outcomes are correlated with self-reported program effectiveness.Item School Dropout and Subsequent Offending: Distinguishing Selection From Causation(2004-02-17) Sweeten, Gary Allen; Bushway, Shawn D; Laub, John H; Paternoster, Raymond; Criminology and Criminal JusticePast research on the relationship between school dropout and offending is inconclusive. In explaining findings, researchers have focused on strain and control theories, and have been unable to rule out selection effects. A key advance in understanding the effect of high school dropout is disaggregation by reason for dropout. Waves one through five of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 is used to answer the question: Does dropout have a causal impact on offending? Dropouts are divided into four groups depending on reason given for dropout: personal, school, economic and other. Estimation of a random effects model indicates that dropout for school reasons and "other" reasons causes a small temporary increase in the frequency of offending whereas dropout for personal or economic reasons does not affect frequency of offending. It also shows that youths who drop out for school reasons have higher rates of offending across all five waves.