College of Behavioral & Social Sciences

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    Trends in the Educational Differences in U.S. Mothers’ Paid Work and Child Care Time-Use and Implications for Mothers’ Well-Being
    (2024) Gao, Ge; Cohen, Philip N; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation explores U.S. mothers’ time allocation to employment and child care post-2000 and its implications for their well-being, addressing three empirical questions: (1) How have educational disparities in mothers’ developmentally adaptive child care time evolved in recent decades? (2) How have paid work-child care time divisions shifted differently for less-educated versus more-educated mothers? (3) What are the trends in educational disparities in mothers’ well-being, and to what extent do mothers’ time-use patterns contribute to these changes? This dissertation found that there has been a significant historical decline in educational disparities in mothers’ developmentally adaptive child care time investment over the past two decades. Second, mothers with different educational attainments have gradually adopted divergent paid work-child care time coordination strategies: while high school and less educated mothers saw an increased tendency to spend high volumes of time on child care without employment, college-educated mothers became more likely to invest moderate time on child care while maintaining full-time professional jobs. Finally, college-educated mothers, who were initially at a disadvantage, have experienced significant improvements in the quantity and quality of downtime over the past two decades. Some evidence suggests that the shifting distribution of paid work-child care time coordination patterns contribute to the enhancements in leisure quality for college-educated mothers. This dissertation offers an updated understanding of how US mothers with varying educational backgrounds balance work and family, the potential trade-offs between mothers’ well-being and children’s development, with suggestive impacts on the intergenerational transmission of advantage.
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    UNDERSTANDING HOW AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH-SPEAKING CHILDREN USE INFLECTIONAL VERB MORPHOLOGY IN SENTENCE PROCESSING AND WORD LEARNING
    (2024) Byrd, Arynn S; Edwards, Jan; Huang, Yi Ting; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This research examined how linguistic differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) impact how children process sentences and learn new information. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that these linguistic differences adversely impact how AAE-speaking children use contrastive inflectional verb morphology (e.g., was/were, third person singular -s) to process and comprehend MAE sentences, as well as to infer word meanings when they depend on dialect-specific parsing of sentence cues. To test this hypothesis, this dissertation conducted three experiments on how linguistic mismatch impacts spoken language comprehension and word learning in school-age MAE- and AAE-speaking children. The first study examined how children used the auxiliary verbs was or were to comprehend MAE sentences in an offline spoken language comprehension task. In contrast, the second study asked the same question in an online sentence processing task. The final study examined how children used inflectional verb morphology (i.e., third-person singular -s, was/were) to infer information about novel verbs. Each study examined how participants’ dialect, either MAE or AAE, predicted performance on listening tasks produced in MAE. Furthermore, each study examined how individual differences such as age, dialect density, and vocabulary size influenced children’s performance.Across all studies, results demonstrated that when there were redundant linguistic cues that were not impacted by dialect differences, AAE- and MAE-speaking children used available linguistic cues to process and comprehend spoken language and infer verb meanings in a similar manner. However, when linguistic redundancy was decreased due to perceptual ambiguity, there were group differences in how AAE- and MAE-speaking children used inflectional verb morphology on spoken language tasks. The second study showed that AAE-speaking children were sensitive to contrastive verb morphology in real-time processing, but they were less likely than their MAE-speaking peers to use it as an informative cue to revise initial parses when processing spoken language. The results of the final study indicated that individual characteristics such as age and dialect density influence how dialect impacts a learning process. These results demonstrate that linguistic mismatch can affect spoken language processes. Furthermore, the findings from this research highlight a complex relationship between the effects of linguistic mismatch and individual differences such as age and dialect density.
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    Essays on Economics of Education
    (2024) Morales Lema, Catalina; Urzúa, Sergio; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this dissertation, I use data from Chile to study the determinants of schooling trajectories. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on higher education, Chapter 3 on secondary education, and Chapter 4 on teachers. Chapter 1 explores the role of a socio-emotional ability, self-efficacy, in understanding why students with comparable qualifications transit different college paths. This study is the first of two papers dedicated to studying the role of self-efficacy in the path students follow after high school. This first paper discusses the psychology literature on self-efficacy and how it can be measured. Then, through exploratory factor analysis and rich administrative data from Chile, I show that self-efficacy is a construct different from pure cognitive ability. Finally, I estimate a discrete choice model for the decisions of taking the college admissions test, applying, enrolling, and graduating from college. I find that conditional on cognitive ability, a higher self-efficacy increases the probability of taking the college admissions test, applying, and graduating from college within eight years. Analyzing heterogeneous effects, I find a bigger effect among students from low-SES families, which are precisely the ones with lower base levels of these outcomes. In Chapter 2, I take a step further and explicitly model the role of self-efficacy on the trajectories students follow after high school using a structural approach. I estimate a multi-stage discrete choice model with unobserved heterogeneity to study the role of self-efficacy on college applications, enrollment, and graduation decisions. The results indicate that higher self-efficacy significantly increases the likelihood of taking the college admissions exam and submitting a college application, conditional on cognitive ability. For students who apply, increasing self-efficacy also increases their probability of enrolling in and graduating from college, even more than a comparable increase in cognitive ability. From the analysis of socioeconomic groups, I document that improving students' self-efficacy could reduce the socioeconomic gaps in the percentage of students who take the college admissions test, apply, and enroll in college. These findings suggest that policies oriented to boost students' self-efficacy could alleviate income-related inequalities in access to higher education. Chapter 3 is co-authored with Dr. Daniel Kraynak and Dr. Cristina Riquelme. It investigates how local economic conditions impact human capital accumulation in Chile's copper-producing zones using high-frequency data on copper prices, school attendance, and academic performance. To measure the exposure to copper price volatility, we created an index by determining the proportion of workers in the area associated with the metal mining industry. We performed a difference-in-differences analysis by comparing students in areas with low and high copper exposure during periods of varying prices. The results indicate that increasing copper prices in more exposed areas decreases the quarterly attendance of high school students in the same period. We also find that students compensate for this lower attendance by increasing their attendance in the next quarter. Analyzing test score performance, we find evidence of a positive effect of local economic conditions on students' math performance in the same period. However, this effect is completely offset in the following year. Chapter 4 is co-authored with Dr. Macarena Kutscher, Dr. Cristina Riquelme, and Dr. Sergio Urzúa. It explores the contribution of teachers to student performance in Chile's college admission test (PSU). Our analysis is based on a unique teacher-student matched dataset and decomposition methods. The findings suggest that teachers' performance on the PSU and the characteristics of their educational degrees are significant predictors of students' success. When controlling for students' and predetermined school characteristics, the gap between vouchers and public schools is reduced. Productivity differences emerge as key factors driving the disparities across school types. The analysis underscores the crucial role of teacher-student interactions in shaping student outcomes.
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    Essays on Higher Education
    (2024) Montoya Agudelo, Alejandra; Urzúa, Sergio; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this dissertation, I quantify the impact of uncertainty on schooling postsecondary choices, study the returns to higher education degrees, and analyze the effects of policies that intend to reduce college education costs. In the second and third chapters, I employ structural Roy models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to analyze postsecondary schooling decisions, focusing on four- and two-year college paths. These models have three sources of unobserved heterogeneity affecting earnings and decisions: cognitive, socioemotional, and mechanical latent abilities. The second chapter employs a dynamic Roy model to quantify the impact of uncertainty when making postsecondary schooling. While schooling choices maximize expected value, some individuals opt for alternatives that, in hindsight, do not yield the highest ex-post net value due to idiosyncratic shocks affecting earnings and schooling costs that are unknown when decisions are made. This uncertainty generates significant losses: I estimate that aggregate net value would increase by 11% if individuals had perfect foresight. Moreover, I study how decisions would change under perfect foresight and characterize individuals more likely to be affected by uncertainty. I also explore policy simulations to study the effects of an annual two-year college $16,500 subsidy, including the characterization of compliers—those more likely to attain a two-year college degree because of the subsidy. The third chapter analyzes the interplay of observed and unobserved dimensions as determinants of marginal treatment effect (MTEs) through decomposition analysis. We posit a static Roy model with unordered schooling choices. We focus on MTEs as they shape other treatment effects and capture the impact for those responding to minimal incentives. Additionally, we estimate the model separately for women and men, focusing on describing how responses and treatment effects vary between these two groups. We find different ability distributions and returns to ability for women and men. Moreover, we document how different observed characteristics and ability dimensions play different roles in determining the heterogeneity observed in MTEs across both groups. The last chapter investigates the impact of financial aid programs on high-quality private colleges' decisions, leveraging exogenous variation from a large-scale aid program in Colombia, where beneficiaries could only enroll at high-quality colleges. Using a difference-in-differences strategy and data for all private colleges in the country, we find that tuition increased by about 6.9 percent after the government launched the aid policy. We contribute to the literature by analyzing the effect of financial aid programs on tuition for high-quality universities and studying how universities might change other outcomes beyond tuition in response to the policy. We show universities hire more faculty members, keep the student-to-faculty constant, and open new undergraduate programs. Our findings support a narrative where prestigious colleges prioritize their reputation, opting for gradual expansion without compromising quality.
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    THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN SUSPENSION OR EXPULSION AND LATER SCHOOL SANCTIONS: DIFFERENCES BY STUDENT RACE AND SCHOOL RACIAL COMPOSITION
    (2024) Potter, Abbey Nicole; Jacobsen, Wade; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The present study investigates the relationship between early childhood suspension or expulsion and students’ odds of experiencing exclusionary discipline in adolescence. In particular, the study examines whether the relationship between childhood suspension and expulsion and the likelihood of experiencing exclusionary discipline in adolescence differs by the combination of student race and school racial composition. While labeling theory can speak to the role of individual student characteristics such as race in the labeling process, the theory is limited in that it says little about the role of social context. This study examines the impact of one aspect of school context, school racial composition, on the relationship between childhood and adolescent experiences of exclusionary discipline, drawing on insights from racial threat theory. The study uses data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a prospective longitudinal study of youth born in large US cities between 1998 and 2000. Main findings include a positive relationship between childhood and adolescent experiences of exclusionary discipline, an independent effect of student race on year 15 suspension risk, and heightened risk for Black, previously-suspended youth in majority-minority school settings. Implications for labeling theory in context and surveillance of youth are discussed.
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    Anxiety and Anxiety-Coping in Children's Picture Books
    (2023) Hui, Janisa; Wang, Cixin; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The contribution of this study is to provide an understanding of how picture books educate young children on the common experiences of anxiety. This qualitative study used thematic analysis to analyze 82 English children’s picture books for infants and young toddlers (0 to 5 years old) that were published in 2020. Picture books in this sample portray anxiety in a way that match with the clinical knowledge of childhood anxiety in terms of characterization and signs of anxiety. This study identified five major themes of anxiety-eliciting situations, namely schools, bad things happen, being alone, health and diversity. The findings of this study also include themes and patterns of coping strategies that were used by the protagonists; finding comfort, inhibiting emotions, solving problems, recognizing and expressing emotions and culturally-related strategies are the five themes that summarize the coping strategies found in this sample. Across all types of anxiety-eliciting situations, finding comfort is the most frequently presented coping strategy. This study holds implications for caregivers, teachers and clinicians, through which they can have an idea of how anxiety is presented in some recently published children’s picture books in their use of the books for educational or clinical purposes. Publishers may also take reference on the gaps noted in this study to diversify the content of anxiety-related picture books.
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    ISOLATING EFFECTS OF PERCEPTUAL ANALYSIS AND SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT ON CHILDREN’S COMPREHENSION OF TWO DIALECTS OF ENGLISH, AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH AND GENERAL AMERICAN ENGLISH
    (2023) Erskine, Michelle E; Edwards, Jan; Huang, Yi Ting; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    There is a long-standing gap in literacy achievement between African American and European American students (e.g., NAEP, 2019, 2022). A large body of research has examined different factors that continue to reinforce performance differences across students. One variable that has been a long-term interest to sociolinguists and applied scientists is children’s use of different dialects in the classroom. Many African American students speak African American English (AAE), a rule-governed, but socially stigmatized, dialect of English that differs in phonology, morphosyntax, and pragmatics from General American English (GAE), the dialect of classroom instruction. Empirical research on dialect variation and literacy achievement has demonstrated that linguistic differences between dialects make it more difficult to learn to read (Buhler et al., 2018; Charity et al., 2004; Gatlin & Wanzek, 2015; Washington et al., 2018, inter alia) and recently, more difficult to comprehend spoken language (Byrd et al., 2022, Edwards et al., 2014; Erskine, 2022a; Johnson, 2005; de Villiers & Johnson, 2007; JM Terry, Hendrick, Evangelou, et al., 2010; JM Terry, Thomas, Jackson, et al., 2022). The prevailing explanation for these results has been the perceptual analysis hypothesis, a framework that asserts that linguistic differences across dialects creates challenges in mapping variable speech signals to listeners’ stored mental representations (Adank et al., 2009; Clopper, 2012; Clopper & Bradlow, 2008; Cristia et al., 2012). However, spoken language comprehension is more than perceptual analysis, requiring the integration of perceptual information with communicative intent and sociocultural information (speaker identity). To this end, it is proposed that the perceptual analysis hypothesis views dialect variation as another form of signal degradation. Simplifying dialect variation to a signal-mapping problem potentially limits our understanding of the contribution of dialect variation to spoken language comprehension. This dissertation proposes that research on spoken language comprehension should integrate frameworks that are more sensitive to the contributions of the sociocultural aspects of dialect variation, such as the role of linguistic and nonlinguistic cues that are associated with speakers of different dialects. This dissertation includes four experiments that use the visual world paradigm to explore the effects of dialect variation on spoken language comprehension among children between the ages of 3;0 to 11;11 years old (years;months) from two linguistic communities, European American speakers of GAE and African American speakers with varying degrees of exposure to AAE and GAE. Chapter 2 (Erskine [2022a]) investigates the effects of dialect variation in auditory-only contexts in two spoken word recognition tasks that vary in linguistic complexity: a) word recognition in simple phrases and b) word recognition in sentences that vary in semantic predictability. Chapter 3 [Erskine (2022b)] examine the effects of visual and auditory speaker identity cues on dialect variation on literal semantic comprehension (i.e., word recognition in semantically facilitating sentences). Lastly, Chapter 4 [Erskine (2022c)] examines the effects of visual and auditory speaker identity cues on children’s comprehension of different dialects in a task that evaluates pragmatic inferencing (i.e., scalar implicature). Each of the studies investigate the validity of the perceptual analysis against sociolinguistcally informed hypotheses that account for the integration of linguistic and nonlinguistic speaker identity cues as adequate explanations for relationships that are observed between dialect variation and spoken language comprehension. Collectively, these studies address the question of how dialect variation impacts spoken language comprehension. This dissertation provides evidence that traditional explanations that focus on perceptual costs are limited in their ability to account for correlations typically reported between spoken language comprehension and dialect use. Additionally, it shows that school-age children rapidly integrate linguistic and nonlinguistic socioindexical cues in ways that meaningfully guide their comprehension of different speakers. The implication of these findings and future research directions are also addressed within.
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    DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF THE PERCEIVED CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE CLIMATE MEASURE FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS (PCRC)
    (2021) Daye, Alyssa Lauren; O'Neal, Colleen; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study makes the contribution of developing a measure that provides voice to African American students, offers a broader view of their school experiences than existing cultural responsivity measures, as well as consequences for their academic outcomes. The present study reports the development and initial validation of a measure of perceived culturally responsive climate for African American adolescents (PCRC). The study relies on the existing longitudinal Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study (MADICS) dataset, a public use dataset collected from 1991-2000. The present study uses two waves of data from participants aged 13 to 18, and the subsample consists of 533 African American youths in Wave 3 (49.3% female; mean age of 14) and 399 African American youths in Wave 4 (51% female; mean age of 17). With the goal of creating a novel measure capturing youth perceptions of cultural responsiveness by both teachers and the school climate, this study combined student self-reported Wave 3 MADICS questionnaires of meaningful and culturally responsive curriculum, high academic expectations, teacher discrimination, peer discrimination, autonomy and self-advocacy, and school social support (i.e., teacher and peer support). Results indicated that a second order factor structure best fit the PCRC measure; the PCRC measure demonstrated adequate internal consistency and test-retest reliability; and the PCRC predicted later math and non-math subject academic ability self-concept for African American adolescents. The study holds implications for schools, educators, and school psychologists hoping to give voice to African American student perceptions of culturally responsive teaching practices and school climate.
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    Essays on Treatment Effects from Multiple Unordered Choices
    (2021) Galindo Pardo, Camila Andrea; Urzúa, Sergio S; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    I study some of the methodological and empirical challenges associated with estimating treatment effects of one option versus another, in contexts where agents can choose from many alternatives with no clear rank (i.e., one option is no better than the other, for everyone). In particular, I focus on educational decisions throughout the life-cycle, such as parental choice of childcare, students' choice of high school, and college enrollment. First, I present a strategy to overcome a limitation of instrumental variables in these settings, where there are many endogenous choices. I use this strategy to provide empirical evidence from an early childhood development intervention in Colombia, where parents can choose among different childcare options (e.g., small centers, large centers, or home care). In the third chapter, I focus on the Chilean high school context where students can choose from three types of schools: academic, vocational, or hybrid. I find that, while academic schools seem to improve the student's academic achievement, the effects of hybrid and vocational schools depend on the student's fallback option (i.e., what they would have chosen if their preferred option was not available). Last, in the Colombian context, jointly with Maria Marta Ferreyra and Sergio Urzúa, I examine the labor market returns to short-cycle degrees versus bachelor’s degrees and versus obtaining a high school diploma. Chapter 2 presents a strategy to estimate causal effects in settings where agents can choose from many options along with empirical evidence from an early childhood development intervention in Colombia. I exploit the joint effect of discrete and continuous instruments on the probability of choosing an option. These combined effects of different instruments have been recognized and studied in contexts where there are only two alternatives. In turn, current methods for multiple unordered choices implicitly assume that the potential response to one instrument is the same across the distribution of other instruments. Instead, I allow for the response to the variation in one instrument (for example, an offer of a slot at a childcare center) to differ depending on other instruments (for example, proximity to the center). To do so, I employ a latent utility framework and model agent's responses to the instruments through their effect on each option's costs. With assumptions motivated by economic theory (i.e., convexity of cost functions), I define conditional vectors consisting of combinations of potential choices that differ along the distribution ofa second instrument. I use conditional vectors and recent advances in the instrumental variables literature to estimate local average treatment effects. With this strategy, I empirically assess the effect of different types of childcare (e.g., small centers, large centers, or home care) on the cognitive, nutritional, and socio-emotional development of children from 0-5 years of age in Colombia. My results suggest that childcare centers with better infrastructure and services could improve some children's cognitive development. In contrast, existing estimation methods would find overall negativeeffects of these centers on cognitive development. In Chapter 3, I estimate the effects of different high school types on educational achievement, such as high school completion and higher education enrollment. I find evidence that suggests that attending a vocational high school does not have a differential effect on the probability of enrolling in a vocational college. Moreover, while hybrid schools seem to foster student enrollment in bachelor’s programs, this effect largely depends on the student's fallback option. In particular, there is no evidence of improvements in educational achievement among students who would have chosen academic schools instead of hybrid schools. In Chapter 4, with Maria Marta Ferreyra and Sergio Urzúa, we provide evidence of diversion and expansion effects of changes in the local supply of short-cycle degrees, in the context of higher education for Colombia. Our results suggest that most students would divert from bachelor's- and into short-cycle- degrees as the local supply of short-cycle degrees changes. For these students we find significant gains, particularly among women, in terms of participation in the formal labor market and years of experience.
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    AN EVALUATION OF YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH FIRST AID TRAINING FOR AMERICORPS CLASSROOM EDUCATORS
    (2020) Ross, Ana-Sophia; Wang, Cixin; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The prevalence and severity of adolescent mental health concerns is clear. Half of youth experience a trauma/adverse event, thus significantly increasing their risk of developing mental illness. Further, suicide recently became the second leading cause of death among young people. Unfortunately, most youth do not get the mental health services they need. Schools, however, are the most likely place to provide formal or informal mental health care. Classroom educators, in particular, are most likely to be the one to refer/recommend students to formal school mental health services and they also provide informal mental health help. Despite their key role, they often feel underprepared to recognize concerning symptoms in youth and to support school mental health efforts. This mixed-methods study explored the impact of training 106 City Year AmeriCorps members in Dade County (Miami, Florida) using the Youth Mental Health First Aid (YMHFA) program. Quantitative data were collected at three points (pre, post, and two months after training) to examine whether YMHFA training equipped corps members with tools to support students’ mental health. Overall, training was associated with short-term improvements in mental health literacy, confidence and intentions to engage in providing mental health first aid behaviors, and knowledge of school based mental health providers. Notably, participants self-reported greater engagement in mental health helping behaviors in the two months after training than in the two months before training. No improvement in mental health stigma was observed, and some short-term improvements (i.e., mental health literacy, intentions to help) were not sustained at follow-up. Qualitative data generally supported quantitative findings and suggested that the YMHFA program is well-suited for classroom educators. However, the program has room to grow in ensuring it helps educators support culturally and linguistically diverse students’ mental health.