The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between nonverbal immediacy of community college teachers, both full-time and part-time, and their within-semester student retention rates.

This study examines the ethical beliefs and behaviors of full-time community college faculty. Respondents report to what degree they practice sixty-two behaviors as teachers and whether they believe the behaviors to be ethical. Survey participants engaged in few of the behaviors, and only reported two actions as ethical: (1) accepting inexpensive gifts from students and (2) teaching values or ethics. The participants reported diverse responses to questions about behavior of a sexual nature, but most agreed that sexual relationships with students or colleagues at the same, higher or lower rank were unethical. Additional findings relate to the presence of diversity among the faculty, using school resources to publish textbooks and external publications, selling goods to students, and an expansive list of other behaviors. Findings of this study are compared to results from earlier studies that utilized the same or similar survey instrument with teaching faculty. The study has implications for organizational policy and procedure, for faculty training and development, the teaching of ethics or values in the classroom and for future research.

This study concerns the relationship between student evaluation of instruction and student achievement in the field of management at the community college level. Purposes of the study were to determine the subjective student evaluation of instructor performance in introductory classes of management, student achievement in the class upon completion of the course, and the relationship between the student evaluation of instructor performance and student achievement in knowledge of the course. The population studied was all 10 sections of the Principles of Management course taught by 8 instructors at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas during the fall semester of 1988. A pretest-posttest design was used to determine student achievement scores. The College Board provided sufficient copies of two versions of the College Level Examination Program (CLEP) tests for Introduction to Management for the pretest and posttest. A special statistical technique using multiple regression was used to calculate an achievement score for each student that was adjusted for entry level knowledge. Student evaluations of instructor performance were paired with the achievement scores and grades students received from the instructor. Additional confidential demographic data was obtained about the students and the instructors. Major findings of the study concluded there is no significant relationship between the student achievement scores and student evaluation of instructor performance. There was a wide variance in correlation of student grades and student achievement scores when individual sections or individual instructors were examined. The overall correlation of grades and achievement scores was statistically significant and was the highest of any of the factors studied. The study recommends using more objective measures of student achievement in evaluating faculty performance.

This study sought to determine the importance community college instructional stakeholders--teachers, administrators, and support staff--ascribe to 23 student outcome goals and to examine the relationships between biographical variables and stakeholders' perceptions. The study addressed the following research questions: (a) Which of the 23 student outcomes do instructional stakeholders as a whole perceive to be most important?; (b) Can these outcomes be factored into a set underlying constructs?; (c) Does the perceived importance of student outcomes vary in relationship to the type of student the stakeholder serves?; (d) Which outcomes do stakeholders serving different types of students value most highly?; (e) Does the perceived importance of student outcomes vary in relationship to: professional role, number of years worked in a community college, number of years worked at the community college surveyed, campus assignment, and gender? Data were collected from 241 subjects employed by a large, urban community college. Subjects rated the importance of 23 student outcomes on a Likert-like scale. The Student Outcome Goals Inventory, a survey instrument developed by the researcher, was used to collect data. Data were analyzed using one or more of the following statistical tests where appropriate: ANOVA, t Test, Factor Analysis, and Discriminant Function Analysis. The major conclusions drawn from this study were: (a) Instructional stakeholders as a group perceived outcomes related to affective constructs, basic skills development, and goal setting to be most important; (b) six constructs represent the outcomes (Personal/Social, Transfer, Credentialing, Employment, Traditional College, and Developmental); (c) Type of student served has a significant relationship to the perceived importance of 12 of the 23 outcomes with most differences occurring between stakeholders serving lower division transfer students and those serving professional/technical students; (d) Few significant relationships exist between the remaining biographical variables and the 23 outcome variables; (e) The type of students stakeholders served can be predicted with 69% accuracy. The outcomes rated most highly by stakeholders are those that represent a foundation of skills that students are typically expected to gain in their secondary education.

This phenomenological research study focused on educational change as perceived by 16 Liberal Arts faculty members at a Pacific Northwest community college. Research data were collected through in-depth dialogic interviews and a follow-up dialogue session with six participants. The principal guiding research questions comprised the following: 1) What is the context of the community college? The institution is facing severe budgetary restrictions, widening diversity of students, the implementation of new technologies and distance learning, changing faculty and administrator roles, competition from the private sector, and the redefining of the community college role. 2) What is the background of the faculty participants? In the past, faculty have experienced a collegial culture and a shared sense of purpose, which no longer seems to exist. Their values are deeply connected to the social responsibilities of education and student needs, which they feel is at odds with the trend toward commodification of education. 3) What are faculty's perceptions of change and its effects? Change is constant; and instructors adapt incrementally. Mandated changes are seen to have fuzzy meanings and hidden agendas, which sometimes go against the core values of higher education. 4) What do faculty want? Faculty want to wrestle with the issues and solutions for dealing with change collaboratively, and they need the time and space to do so. They also want administrators to hear their voice, and to include faculty priorities in educational decision-making. Faculty participants had clear ideas on ways that would make the implementation of change more successful and meaningful in their lives and in the future of their community college: 1) Make change for a worthy or merited purpose. 2) Listen to what faculty have to say. 3) Allow faculty to wrestle with the challenges. 4) Provide faculty with support and recognition. 5) Keep student needs as a central priority. 6) Maintain the human values and social purpose of education. Most important, faculty feel that the human element cannot be discounted or forgotten in the rush to transform higher education, for faculty are the ones charged with the implementation of most change initiatives and they must deal with the consequences. / Graduation date: 2002

For the past 100 years, the prominent instructional model for all public education in the United States has been teacher/content centered with the intent of covering a discrete body of knowledge in a given period of time. As the end of the twentieth century approaches, natural, social, political, and economic forces are influencing community college instructors to transition from content centered instruction to a student centered approach to teaching and learning as part of the national education reform agenda. The purpose of this study was to document, through a case study, the experience of one community college instructor as she attempted to transition from a traditional content focused teaching model to an outcome-based/learner centered model. A literature survey provides a review of education reform as it relates to instructors in a community college. A learner centered training model from industry, is applied as a framework for outcome-based/learner centered instruction in community colleges. Participant observation, surveys, and interviews were the methods used to collect data. Six hypotheses were generated from the study: 1. Learner centered/outcome-based teaching is more complex and takes greater skill in basic teaching techniques than teaching in a traditional content framework. 2. An instructor whose teaching experience has been exclusively content focused may find it difficult to create authentic learning tasks. 3. Collegial influence is a major factor affecting the ability of one instructor to change instructional practices. 4. A single instructor's ability to change instructional practice in one course is limited by the way the program curriculum is designed. 5. Learning is enhanced by human relationships that foster trust and reflective practice. 6. Teaching and learning is complex and multifaceted in nature: it is not a logical linear process. / Graduation date: 1996

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Commonwealth University, 2006. / Prepared for: School of Education. Bibliography: leaves 165-172. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 152-160). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-292). Also available on the Internet.

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