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This study addressed the broader issue of the negative impact of the community college practice of hiring large numbers of part-time faculty on graduation rates. Prior research has determined that higher ratios of full-time faculty correlate significantly and positively with community college graduation rates. This study extended the research of institutional models affecting community college graduation rates and investigated the nature of regional accreditation for the adequacy of full-time faculty as a determinate of graduation rates. This study included all public 2-year institutions in the United States. A correlational research design was implemented using data available through the National Center for Education Statistics and the nation’s six regional accrediting agencies for community colleges. Among the major findings in the study, graduation rates were found to be significantly correlated among schools belonging to different regional accreditation agencies. The study also determined that ratios of full-time faculty, institution size, instructional spending, and ratios of full-time students correlated significantly with increased graduation rates. When comparing community colleges among regional accreditors that had no standards for regulating the adequacy of full-time faculty with those who do, graduation rates did not correlate significantly. These results contribute to the body of knowledge for institutional effects on graduation rates and also have important implications for regional accreditors. The results suggest that regional accrediting standards for the adequacy of full-time faculty may need to be more prescriptive in nature to provide a direct impact on graduation rates.

This study focuses on the effects of part-time employment of high school students during the school year. While there are many benefits to be derived from part-time employment, many researchers have concluded that working intensely (over 20 hours per week) during the school year has deleterious academic, social, and psychological effects on high school students' achievement (Bachman & Schulenberg, 1983; Mortimer & Finch, 1986; Steinberg & Dornbusch, 1991; Wright, Cullen, & Williams, 2002). The study made reference to the theory of social embeddedness (Granovetter, 1985) and the primary orientation model (Warren, 2002) which suggested that high intensity work reduces time to focus on and become involved in other activities. There is also application to the ecological theory of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1986) which stated that social contexts such as school, family, and work should all have connections to provide significant influences on adolescents’ development. In this study, it was hypothesized that intense work involvement would be related to less engagement in school and school activities. It was further hypothesized that intensity of work will be negatively related to family and peer relationships. The data for the study were obtained from three school divisions in southwest Virginia. A sample of N=1,402 high school students in grades 9-12 was used. Students completed the Work, School, and Social Experiences of High School Students Survey, which was adapted for the study. The data were analyzed using SPSS 14.0. The researcher employed descriptive and regression based analysis procedures to answer the research questions, and to determine the relationships among variables of interest. The results indicated that intense part-time employment by high school students has negative effects on grades, family relationships, and peer relationship and often contributes to increased stress in the lives of these students. Part-time employment affects all aspects of students' lives and is far nuanced and needs continued attention and supervision from parents, educators, and teachers. This research was supported by a 2005 Graduate Research Development Project grant from the Graduate Student Assembly at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). / Ph. D.

The workforce of today is a far cry from the workforce of yesteryear. Not only have there been changes in who works, but how one works as well. The traditional nine-to-five work day has been replaced by a plethora of flexible work options, including flextime, telecommuting, and part-time employment. Until recently, most part-time workers were those who worked in low-level, low-paying jobs. However, with the influx of women in the workplace, as well as the desire for more leisure time and the need for retraining and updating of skills, more people than ever before desire professional part-time jobs. Although considerable research exists comparing full-time to part-time workers, little research is available which examines the experiences of the professional part-time employee. The central question of this study concerned which factors exist within an organization, as well as within the part-time professional and supervisor, to influence levels of job satisfaction and commitment. A questionnaire was mailed to 805 members of the Association of Part-Time Professionals which gathered demographic characterics about the employee and supervisor, and the provision of benefits for employees. Additional questions concerned attitudes of co-workers, anticipated effects on career advancement, access to staff training, and provision of space, equipment, and clerical support. The final sample included 319 part-time professionals across the career spectrum. A variety of statistical techniques was used to examine the relationships among organizational and supervisor characteristics and the individual characteristics of the participants. Factor analyses were employed to identify the different participant attitudes. The bivariate relationships between attitudes and respondent and organizational characteristics were used to develop multivariate models. Participants generally had high levels of job satisfaction and relatively neutral levels of commitment. Part-time professionals felt positive about their access to equipment, clerical assistance, and office space, but less so about their economic compensation. They were generally satisfied with the work they were asked to do and their treatment by supervisors and co-workers. Access to benefits was variable. Implications for the Adult Educator/Human Resource Specialist are discussed with recommendations made as to how both can promote and advance the needs of the part-time professional. Areas for future research are also presented. / Ph. D.

With the growing number of textual resources available, the ability to understand them becomes critical. An essential first step in understanding these sources is the ability to identify the parts-of-speech in each sentence. The goal of this research is to propose, improve, and implement an algorithm capable of finding terms (words in a corpus) that are used in similar ways--a term categorizer. Such a term categorizer can be used to find a particular part-of-speech, i.e. nouns in a corpus, and generate a lexicon. The proposed work is not dependent on any external sources of information, such as dictionaries, and it shows a significant improvement (~30%) over an existing method of categorization. More importantly, the proposed algorithm can be applied as a component of an unsupervised part-of-speech tagger, making it truly unsupervised, requiring only unannotated text. The algorithm is discussed in detail, along with its background, and its performance. Experimentation shows that the proposed algorithm performs within 3% of the baseline, the Penn-TreeBank Lexicon. / Master of Science

The purpose of this study will be to make an investigation of the shifting of a word from one part of speech to another, to see whether this linguistic process existed in Old English, Middle English, and to note the prevalence of functional shift among present-day writers.

The study investigated the effects of two generative learning activities on students’ academic achievement of the part-whole representation of rational numbers while using virtual manipulatives. Third-grade students were divided randomly in two groups to evaluate the effects of two generative learning activities: answering-questions and generating-examples while using two virtual manipulatives related to part-whole representation of rational numbers. The study employed an experimental design with pre- and post-tests. A 2x2 mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to determine any significant interaction between the two groups (answering questions and generating-examples) and between two tests (pre-test and immediate post-test). In addition, a 2x3 mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) and a Bonferroni post-hoc analysis were used to determine the effects of the generative strategies on fostering comprehension, and to determine any significant differences between the two groups (answering-questions and generating-examples) and among the three tests (pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed posttest). Results showed that an answering-questions strategy had a significantly greater effect than a generating-examples strategy on an immediate comprehension posttest. In addition, no significant interaction was found between the generative strategies on a delayed comprehension tests. However a difference score analysis between the immediate posttest scores and the delayed posttest scores revealed a significant difference between the answering-questions and the generating-examples groups suggesting that students who used generating-examples strategy tended to remember relatively more information than students who used the answering-questions strategy. The findings are discussed in the context of the related literature and directions for future research are suggested. / Ph. D.

No / In response to a recent report published by the Royal College of Nursing, Bryan McIntosh, Uduak Archibong and Louise Donaghy discuss the impact of motherhood, part-time hours and career breaks on the cultural perceptions and experiences of female healthcare professionals.

by Cheung Ka Mei, Vanessa, Chung Yuk King, Mecky. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1989. / Bibliography: leaf 47.