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open access

College Success for all Students: An Investigation of Early Warning Indicators of College Readiness

Description: The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine early warning indicators of college readiness among early college high school students at selected Texas institutions of higher education. Participants in this study included 134 of the class of 2010 from two early college high schools. The graduates were 86% Hispanic, 8% African American, 3% White, 2% Asian, 1% American Indian and 72% economically disadvantaged. A causal-comparative research design using multiple regression analysis of th… more
Date: December 2010
Creator: Davis, Denise
open access

An Examination of Parents' Preferred School Counselor Professional Activities

Description: The purpose of this study was to examine parent preferences for school counselor professional activities. The primary focus of research was to determine if any relationship exists between (1) parents' demographic factors - gender, age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity - and their preferences for school counselors' professional activities; (2) educational factors - parents' level of education and grade level of their student (9-12) - and parents' preferences for professional activities; and (3) p… more
Date: December 2010
Creator: Wilder, Christopher
open access

An Exploratory Study of the Impact of Institutional Policies and Practices of Community and Technical Colleges in Texas on Student Persistence in Online Courses

Description: Online education is the fastest growing form of course delivery of higher education in the United States. It has revolutionized how students and instructors interact in the educational process. Yet students in online courses continue to experience higher attrition rates than their counterparts in traditional face-to-face classes despite the advantages offered by the technology. This study examined the impact that institutional policies and practices at community colleges in the state of Texas h… more
Date: December 2010
Creator: Hills, Fred W.
open access

A Quantitative Analysis of the Relationship of a Non-traditional New Student Orientation in an Urban Community College with Student Retention and Grade Point Average Among Ethnic Groups

Description: This quantitative study examined relationships of attending a new student orientation program related to student retention and academic success. A research group of 464 students of Tarrant County College Northwest, a community college campus in Fort Worth, Texas, who voluntarily attended a 2-hour pre-semester new student orientation program was compared to a group of 464 students on the same campus who did not attend the program. Comparisons were made with regard to retention and GPA. Ethnic ra… more
Date: December 2010
Creator: Martinez, Vesta Wheatley
open access

The Relationship of Service-Learning and Campus Involvement: A Multivariate Look at the Profile of Today's College Student

Description: Service-learning continues to gain in popularity across the higher education landscape and can be found in most educational institutions. Although more often found in student affairs programming, it is also viewed as a viable pedagogy. Most studies show that service-learning impacts students in various ways: academically, socially and vocationally. The research study employed quantitative methods. It analyzed prediction of participation in community service/service-learning with students' self-… more
Date: December 2010
Creator: Kittle, Kris J.
open access

A Study of African American Students' Completion of an Accounting Degree at a Private University

Description: The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify factors that may have influenced the choice of major and the persistence to graduation of six African American accounting majors who attended and graduated from a private, predominantly white university from the academic years 2003 through 2009. A set of indicators based on several retention studies was selected for the purpose of identifying pre-college, off-campus, and on-campus factors that influenced students' choice of major and persist… more
Date: December 2010
Creator: Eddington, Alicia F.
open access

Adlerian Play Therapy: Effectiveness on Disruptive Behaviors of Early Elementary-Aged Children

Description: Approximately 20% of children experience serious mental health problems severe enough to meet diagnosis criteria, and less than one third of these children receive the services they need. Identifying effective school-based counseling interventions provides a viable and accessible solution, especially for families with financial barriers. This randomized, controlled outcome study examined the effectiveness of Adlerian play therapy (AdPT) compared to reading mentoring (RM) with 58 kindergarten t… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Meany-Walen, Kristin K.
open access

Baptist Pastoral Leadership: An Analysis for Curriculum Development

Description: Through a qualitative study utilizing in-depth interviews, practitioner opinion was gathered regarding how Christian institutions of higher education, primarily Baptist seminaries, may better utilize formal and continuing education to prepare clergy for pastoral leadership. The sample of ten subjects for this study, drawn from the 550 active senior pastors in the Dallas Baptist Association and the Kauf-Van Baptist Association, was selected based on a maximum variation sampling method. The inten… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Christine, David Wayne
open access

College Student Resilience: Selected Effects of Service-Learning

Description: Resilience implies the concept of buoyancy. Specifically, it denotes an individual's capacity to persevere and even do well in the face of adversity. Service-learning is pedagogy often used to enable students to apply classroom learning in a real world context. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of service-learning upon college student resilience. The study utilized a convenience sample of undergraduate students (N = 172) across three disciplines including counseling, social work… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Mercer, J. Carol
open access

The Correlates of Number of Minority Faculty, Minority Student Organizations, Diversity Course Offerings, and Geographic Location to Minority Student Enrollment in Texas Colleges

Description: This study examined the correlates between the dependent variables African-American and Hispanic student enrollment in Texas public higher education to the independent variables institution type, education region, faculty demographics, curricular offerings and student organizations. Data for African-American (n = 124,000) and Hispanic enrollment (n = 314,000) in all Texas public higher education institutions (n = 109) for the 2008 academic year were examined. Significant results, using a statis… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Kraus, Charles
open access

The Development of the Child Interpersonal Relationships and Attitudes Assessment for Child Centered Play Therapy

Description: The purpose of this study was to develop a parent report form instrument congruent with the philosophy of child-centered play therapy. The study sought to develop an instrument with acceptable levels of construct validity, reliability, sensitivity to clinical attitudes and relationships, and responsiveness to intervention. The Child Interpersonal Relationships and Attitudes Assessment (CIRAA) and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBC) and the Parenting Stress Index (PSI) were administered to 136 pa… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Holliman, Ryan P.
open access

Effects of a Near-Death Experience Learning Module on Grief

Description: The researcher examined the effectiveness of a near-death experience (NDE) learning module on reducing distressing aspects and enhancing a growth aspect of grief among bereaved adults. Participants were 22 females and 2 males; 2 identified as African American, 3 as Asian, 2 as Latina/o, and 17 as White; aged 20 to 71 years with mean age 35.3 years. In this experimental design, the researcher randomly assigned 12 participants to the experimental group and 12 participants to the waitlist no treat… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Foster, Ryan D.
open access

An Investigation of the Perceptions of Christian Seminary Counseling Students Regarding Play Therapy

Description: The threefold purpose of this study was to assess the extent to which counseling seminary students' beliefs corresponded to the tenets of child-centered play therapy, the amount of training seminary counseling students received in the area of child counseling and play therapy, and the applicability of child-centered play therapy courses in seminary counselor education programs. The researcher pursued this purpose through administration of a survey instrument she developed. The instrument cons… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Thacker, Andi
open access

Mentoring in Higher Education Music Study: Are Good Teachers Mentors?

Description: This quantitative study examined the correlation between how college level music students rated their teachers on the Fowler/O'Gorman Mentor Functions Questionnaire and how they perceived two aspects of their private music lessons: 1) to what extent they perceived their relationship with their teachers as positive, and 2) to what extent they perceived their teachers as good. The respondents for this study were 295 undergraduate and graduate music majors studying at 5 private universities or mus… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: McCowen, Heather V.
open access

A Mixed Method Analysis of Undergraduate Student-run Public Relations Firms on U.S. College Campuses

Description: Student-run public relations firms are part of collegiate public relations pedagogy, and this study used a mixed-method approach to analyze such firms on U.S. campuses. A listing of campuses with student-run firms was created as part of this study. Through an online survey questionnaire, advisers from 55 of the 119 student-run firms provided data about firm characteristics and observations about student learning and career development. Multiple correspondence analyses was used to see if the fir… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Maben, Sarah Kathleen
open access

A Mixed-Methods Approach to the Experiences of Non-Offending Parents of Children who have Experienced Sexual Abuse Participating in Child Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT)

Description: When a child has been sexually abused, the non-offending parent and child may benefit from an intervention aimed at enhancing the parent child relationship. This mixed-methods study examined the process of child parent relationship therapy (CPRT) with non-offending parents of children who had been sexually abused. One purpose of the present study was to examine change in parent-child relationship, child behavior, and parent empathy of non-offending parents whose children have been sexually abus… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: West, Brooke E.
open access

Parental Rights: Curriculum Opt-outs in Public Schools

Description: The purposes of this dissertation were to determine the constitutional rights of parents to shield their children from exposure to parts of the public school curriculum that the parents find objectionable on religious, moral, or other grounds and to determine the statutory rights of parents to remove, or opt-out, their children from objectionable parts or all of the public school curriculum as set forth in the statutes of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Many pivotal federal court ca… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Rogers, Tommy Kevin
open access

Relationships Among and Between Early and Late Freshmen Admission Applications and Academic Persistence

Description: This quantitative study investigated relationships among and between university early and late admitted freshmen and academic performance and persistence. The participants in this study consisted of 3,197 early freshmen applicants and 309 late freshmen applicants admitted at a large southwestern student centered public research university over the course of the year prior to the fall 2008 academic year. Significant results, using a statistical significance level of p < .05, were reported for t… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Hale, Lynne Rochelle
open access

Analysis of Graduation Rates for Four-year Colleges: A Model of Institutional Performance Using IPEDS

Description: Under the George W. Bush U.S. presidential administration, the federal government pushed for greater accountability among institutions of higher education for educational outcomes. Graduation rate is a key performance indicator of institutional accountability. Previous researchers of student attrition focused primarily on the effects of student level factors on student persistence/withdrawal behavior. Recently, researchers put more focus on the effects of institutional characteristics on gradua… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Fung, Terence Yip-hung
open access

An Assessment of Undergraduate Course Syllabi in the Departments of English at Universities in Taiwan

Description: This exploratory, qualitative research explored the extent that course syllabi in the Departments of English in 13 public and 9 private universities in Taiwan reflect the inclusion of syllabus components to promote learning as recommended in the literature in the United States. Research questions included: what components can be inferred from the literature in the U.S. for the recommended components of a course syllabus, for the components for a learning-centered syllabus, and for a model to an… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Lin, Baysan
open access

A Case Study of Undergraduate Course Syllabi in Taiwan

Description: Higher education in Taiwan has been influenced by U.S. and Western practices, and syllabi represent one means to verify this. However, limited research exists in Taiwan on course syllabi and on similarities of syllabi with practices in other countries. In the U.S. as the paradigm shifted from teaching to learning and to the learning-centered context, scholars argued that syllabi should be learning-centered. Given the assumption that higher education in Taiwan is similar to U.S. higher education… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Tung, Yao-Tsu
open access

Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) with Adoptive Families: Effects on Child Behavior, Parent-Child Relationship Stress, and Parental Empathy

Description: This randomized controlled study is a preliminary investigation on the effects of Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) with 61 adoptive parents. The participants in this study identified themselves as the following: 54 European American, 3 Black American, 3 Hispanic/Latino, and 1 individual who chose not to indicate ethnicity. The study included 23 couples and 15 individual mothers. The CPRT is a structured, time limited approach that trains caregivers to be an active participant as a the… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Carnes-Holt, Kara
open access

The Historical Development of Tertiary Education in the Bahamas: The College of the Bahamas, Past, Present, and Future.

Description: The purpose of this study was to provide a historical overview of the development of the College of the Bahamas, and to examine the development of the College of the Bahamas in light of the College of the Bahamas Act of 1974 and the subsequent Act of 1995. The research was qualitative in nature using historical analysis. The primary means of investigation were analyses of both primary and secondary documents and interviews with key individuals who were important to the development of the Colleg… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Dames, Terren L.
open access

Living-learning communities and ethnicity: A study on closing the achievement gap at Regional University

Description: This quasi-experimental study examined the impact of living-learning communities on GPA and fall-to-fall retention rates for college freshmen at Regional University (RU). The specific focus of this study was the effect of these communities on students of different ethnic groups and on the potential of these communities to reduce the academic performance gap. RU was a small public university that offered both undergraduate and graduate degree programs. RU required all freshman students to live o… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Bewley, Jason Loyd
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