Some students are entering college and graduating with the inability to write scholarly and professionally. The purpose of this instrumental case study was to examine the perceptions of college instructors and students about the essential writing skills of entering first-year college students within a Southwestern university. This study provided insight into strategies to engage students in the writing process, both before and after entering college. Vygotsky's social constructivism provided the framework for this study. The research questions included an examination of the perceptions of students' writing skills based on what instructors, students, and writing center personnel observed; what instructors and students believed to be essential writing skills necessary for entering first-year college students to be academically successful; and what the writing center personnel and students' perceptions were regarding writing resources that were deemed beneficial to entering first-year college students to help improve their writing skills. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with 12 participants: 4 instructors, 5 students, and 3 writing center personnel. Data analysis included theme identification based on key words from the interviews. According to study results, findings revealed factors that contributed to poor writing, common writing errors, required writing skills to be academically successful, and writing resources. These findings led to the development of a 3-day professional development (PD) workshop. Participation in the PD workshop may lead to modifications in the curriculum at local high schools and entry-level courses taught to entering first-year college students, resulting in positive social change.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Special Education, Counseling and Student Affairs / Christy Craft / The increasingly integrated presence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on university campuses in recent decades has prompted calls for a better understanding of how students use ICTs in higher education, including the transition to college. While research indicates that students with higher self-efficacy are more likely to persist in college, current research makes few connections between students’ self-efficacy with ICTs and persistence. Additionally, researchers in the area of student retention call for educators to understand how their students perceive the college’s cultural environment so as to help students fit in at an institution and persist. Exploration of ICTs as part of a student’s social, academic, and cultural experiences at the university offers educators and administrators the possibility of modifying the college’s cultural properties in response to student needs. This qualitative study investigated first-year college students and their use of technologies to address the following research question: How do first-year college students perceive their experiences using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the higher education environment? Employing interviews and a phenomenological approach, this study explored the experiences of 19 undergraduate students. Six faculty members or instructors were interviewed about their teaching experiences with first-year students and the extent to which ICTs were incorporated in those experiences in order to provide triangulation of data. Through the analysis of interview transcripts and open coding, three themes emerged regarding how students experience ICTs in higher education. Statements from students and faculty suggest that students experienced ICTs in higher education as: a process of academic integration; situations for which they held internal or external loci of control when using them for academic purposes; and tools to use when becoming socially integrated into the university. The findings of this study have the potential to assist university faculty, instructors, and other staff who are designing courses and services for first-year students. First, the study’s findings indicate that instructors need to be as explicit as possible with their expectations of student use of technology. When students are expected to demonstrate certain behaviors with ICTs those behaviors should be both supported and modeled by faculty and instructors. Secondly, when using ICTs for academic purposes, faculty can help students feel more responsible for their learning by providing them with opportunities to make decisions about how ICTs are used or to incorporate their own problem-solving or learning techniques with ICTs when completing coursework. Finally, faculty, instructors, and other staff should be aware that when first-year students are using ICTs socially, they are trying to create and maintain in-person relationships. Faculty, instructors, and other staff can guide first-year students to events and resources that will help them meet people and locate a social group in which they feel like they fit in.

Separation anxiety disorder (SAD) is rarely considered in adults presenting with anxious symptomatology, but a growing body of evidence suggests that its symptoms are experienced by a significant number of adults. Early parent-child relationships are an especially important area of study for understanding SAD. Moreover, the attachment style that is formed through early parent-child interactions may serve as a mediator to later expression of symptoms of adult separation anxiety (ASA). Studying the early parent-child relationship and perceived parenting styles in conjunction with individual attachment styles will allow for a more systemic approach to understanding potential risk factors for the development of ASA. Young adult college students may be particularly vulnerable to ASA as they transition into college and away from primary caregivers. This study investigates a mediational model with individual attachment style serving as a mediator between perceived early parenting styles and symptoms of ASA in 170 first-year college students between the ages of 18-20. As anticipated a large percent of the sample endorsed clinically significant levels of symptoms of ASA (47%). In addition, results utilizing bootstrapping analyses demonstrated that a perceived indifferent parenting style had an indirect effect on symptoms of ASA, with the effect occurring through an anxious attachment style. Support for the mediation model was obtained when statistically controlling for perceived parenting styles of overcontrol and abuse as well as confounding variables including age, sex, number of different families lived with and emotionality domains of temperament (distress, anger, and fearfulness). Highlighting the role of perceived parenting styles and attachment styles in the development of symptoms of ASA will serve to establish potential family-based interventions and help in the development of prevention programs. Examining symptoms of ASA in young adult college students may result in the development of university-based psycho-educational programs to help these students master a challenging transitional period. This study is one of the first to explore a model that can help to explain the developmental trajectory of symptoms of ASA. Future studies are encouraged to consider symptoms of ASA when investigating anxious symptomatology in adult populations.

First year college student retention is important to colleges and universities nationwide (Bean, 2005). Most of the research on retention focuses on self-report data collected from students after they withdraw from the institution. The present study focuses, instead, on student stories about school, as well as at and about “home” during their first semester. The experiences of students who transition from high school to college are sometimes likened to those of individuals who enter a new culture for the first time. Thus, this dissertation is grounded in cross-cultural adaptation theory (Kim, 1988, 2001), which posits that successful adaptation occurs via a stress-adaption-growth dynamic and a gradual process of acculturation toward the new environment and simultaneous deculturation from the previous environment. Stories—in the form of in-class free writing assignments—were collected from 264 first-year college students three times during their first semester. These assignments were designed to capture students’ perceptions about their experiences and interactions at school, as well as their experiences and messages to, from, and about “home” as they evolved over the course of the semester. A thematic analysis revealed the majority of stories about events at school were negative and an overwhelming majority of the stories about events at home were positive. A longitudinal comparative analysis revealed no decrease in the percentage of negative stories about experiences and interactions at or about school. Moreover, stories focused on positive school related experiences decreased over time while stories about positive experiences at or about home gradually increased over the course of the semester. For students who did not enroll for spring semester, the results were similar but more dramatic. A large percentage of non-returners were female, about half were first generation college students, and a majority reported “home” as less than 100 miles from the university. More research ought to focus on what goes on during a student’s first year of college to better understand reasons for withdrawing. In doing so, college and university professionals will be able to work more effectively with high school officials, parents, and students to achieve success once they graduate from high school.

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There is a pervasive belief in the United States that the college experience typically includes frequent social activities characterized by widespread alcohol use. Unfortunately, awareness of the hundreds of deaths and wide variety of other harms experienced by college students as a result of alcohol use is much less pervasive. In an effort to increase awareness of the negative impact of alcohol use on college campuses, the NIAAA commissioned a panel composed of scientists and college presidents to document alcohol-related harms and identify strategies that have been found to be effective in reducing risky alcohol use based on empirical evidence. The final report of this expert panel was released as a "Call to Action" for institutions nationwide in an effort to increase understanding of the severity and prevalence of risky alcohol use, and to provide descriptions of programs that were considered effective based on empirical evidence. Unfortunately, there were very few strategies found to be effective, and one of the effective approaches could only be implemented in specialized laboratories operated by scientists with expertise in expectancy challenge. Due to the severity and pervasiveness of the college alcohol problem and the limited number of strategies deemed effective, there is clearly a pressing need to develop and validate an expectancy challenge method that could be implemented by any institution without being limited by the need for a specialized laboratory and highly trained personnel. Achievement of these goals was the focus of the present project. To this end, an expectancy challenge curriculum designed for delivery in a college classroom was developed based on a laboratory delivered protocol previously found to be effective in reducing alcohol use among college students, and a classroom delivered curriculum previously found to be effective with high school students. The newly developed college classroom curriculum was implemented in a single session with groups of students during their regular class time in their usual classroom. Measures of alcohol use and associated harms were completed anonymously by each participant before completing the curriculum and for the month following completion of the curriculum. Analyses indicated significant reductions in alcohol consumption among males and females in comparison to students who were randomly assigned to a wait-list control condition. Unfortunately, significant reductions in alcohol-related harms were not found. The time periods for baseline and follow-up were only one month each, and that limitation in the number of opportunities to experience harms limits the likelihood of demonstrating a significant reduction in harms as well. Overall, this project represents an important advance in the development of alcohol use reduction strategies that are theory-based and effective in reducing alcohol use based on empirical evidence. In addition, the curriculum that was developed and validated in this project represents the first expectancy challenge method that can be readily implemented at any institution willing to devote one hour to reducing their students' risk for a long list of negative consequences associated with alcohol use on college campuses. Motivation and a typical classroom are all that is needed.

Scholars have documented the ways in which the influence of neoliberal ideology, and particularly the extension of free-market logic, has resulted in meaningful changes within colleges and universities in the United States. However, largely omitted from these discussions is the impact of neoliberal ideology on college students. Concurrent with the discussion concerning neoliberalism and higher education, a separate dialogue focusing on the rise of the conceptualization of students as customers has been occurring amongst higher education scholars. Such an understanding of college students is consistent with free-market logic, as the relationship between students and their institutions become defined in economic terms. While many scholars have lamented about the rise of this new approach towards education, few have connected it with larger changes in higher education or with the influence of neoliberal ideology. More importantly, researchers have yet to measure reliably the extent to which students actually express a customer orientation. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide the first measure of a customer orientation, and in the process help describe the impact neoliberal ideology, and freemarket logic in particular, has had on college students.

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