This study documented the processes for introducing varied instructional styles of teachers in effective use of academic learning time with at-risk youth in an urban junior high school and how these youth perceived teachers. Staff development for academic achievement depends critically on implementation procedures and their involvement of teachers (and students) in ways that respect their intentions and competencies. Thus, a focus on cooperation among teachers, administrators, support staff members, and parents shaped the design and implementation of school improvement efforts. Staff development lead teachers and supervisors of teachers to examine classroom processes and teaching styles that related to performance of at-risk students. The hypothesis: Varied instructional styles in the effective use of academic learning time impacts positively on the performance of at-risk students has been shown in many studies. This research showed a gain in attitudes among students and teachers. At-risk students responded positively to classroom instruction where teachers reorganized and adjusted teaching to maximize student learning. The major question of this study was, can teachers in urban junior high schools be motivated to work with at-risk youth, and if so, how? This research showed that teachers can be motivated to work with at-risk students. Staff development caused changes in the instructional delivery of teachers. A very positive relationship developed between teachers and students. Teachers became concerned about the welfare of these youths beyond that which was happening academically in the classroom. Overall, the project demonstrated that low cost staff development is possible in urban schools when: (1) Teachers are allowed to use research and apply it in their own way; (2) Teachers, administrators, students, and parents work cooperatively together; and, (3) Teachers realize that all children can learn.

Students dropping out of school at an early stage represent a problem in developed and poor countries. It becomes even more critical when the disappointment and frustration cause parents and their children to question the goal of education, which for them is to find meaningful employment. Unemployment among young people in Côte d'Ivoire is reaching staggering proportions, and poverty among rural dwellers is at its worst. Meanwhile, rural areas are drained of any young substance. Clearly, the battle for development is being lost. This study explores the attitudes of students, parents, teachers and school officials toward rural development and explores school-based cooperatives as a way to help primary school dropouts make a successful transition from school to real life. A qualitative method was used in combination with quantitative method to give a voice to ordinary Ivorians through 300 surveys, 12 in-depth interviews, one focus group with teachers, school officials, students and parents. Subjects took a close look at the education available, reevaluated their attitudes and speculated on how they can take advantage of the education that is available to them prepare for a meaningful life in the rural areas. The findings and implications are: (1) The attitude toward rural development is negative. (2) The occupational aspirations of youth are predominantly prestigious white-collar jobs. (3) To be successful, teachers need better training and better salaries. (4) The introduction of national languages will facilitate parents' interaction with schools. (5) Rural areas are not attractive enough for young people to want to make a living. (6) Education by itself cannot solve all the problems of underdevelopment. (7) A school to work transition program is necessary. (8) Private organizations need to finance new programs in education. (9) Development of the rural areas needs to occur alongside the development of urban areas. (10) Land reform is needed to facilitate land ownership. (11) A change in mentality and attitude needs to occur.

The purpose of this study was two-fold: (a) to reestablish the fact that "at-risk" students working with "caring adults" in a school-business partnership do better in school than those at-risk students who do not, and (b) to determine precisely what attributes the school volunteer is bringing to the partnership program that is making the difference. The project, using a quasi-experimental design, included two stages of data collection and analysis for a random sampling of 25 students participating in a school-business partnership program, 25 nonparticipants, and a group of school volunteers from the Coopers and Lybrand Accounting Firm (N = 25) who met with the participants on a weekly basis. In the first stage, data were generated through a pre- and post-School Situation Survey (SSS) for both participant and nonparticipant groups. School records were scanned to obtain attendance rates for the nine months and compared for the two groups. Analysis of the data between the participants and nonparticipants revealed that participants demonstrated a 7.0 mean gain over the nine months (October-June) Monday through Friday in attendance. The difference in school stress as revealed through the pre- and post-testing (SSS) showed no significant mean difference overall. The second stage called for an examination of the behaviors and attitudes of the "caring adults" through a personality survey, The Adjective Check List (ACL). A careful examination was then made of the participant scores on the stress test (SSS) to determine the rate of gain and/or loss for the 25 students. Comparative analysis of participant performance on the stress measurement (SSS) determined that 16 of the 25 students (64%) made gains overall; nine students made little or no gains. The design then compared student gains or losses with observed behaviors and attitudes of the caring adults as revealed on the (ACL) that appeared to have some bearing on the changed behavior as revealed by the stress test. Analysis of the raw data taken from The Adjective Check List and applied to the Mann-Whitney U Test revealed that there were no statistically significant differences in the attributes of the 25 caring adults.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the informational needs of incoming clients at college counseling centers. Two primary questions were asked: first, what areas of information do students identify as important in deciding whether or not to enter counseling; and second, what knowledge from other sources do students bring to this process. Subjects were 297 student clients at three college counseling centers. An optional questionnaire was administered at intake which asked students to rate the importance of nine areas of information about counseling. The questionnaire also examined the student's expectations about the duration of counseling and knowledge about confidentiality policy and the benefits and risks of counseling. Content areas addressed in the questionnaire were drawn from the literature on informed consent and client informational materials. Results suggest that, overall, students are interested in a wide range of information about counseling and that knowledge they bring with them is often incomplete. Data analysis included subgroup comparisons according to gender, prior experience with counseling or psychotherapy, SES, age, and year in school. Women and students with prior experience in counseling tend to be more interested in receiving information about confidentiality policy, theoretical orientation, format of counseling or psychotherapy, and duration of counseling. Also, women are more interested in information about success rates. Client knowledge of benefits and risks of counseling or psychotherapy, although incomplete, appears accurate with respect to current literature in these areas. The desirability of increased use of informed consent procedures and client informational materials is discussed.

A number of researchers have developed treatment packages to improve social competence in young elementary school age children. Such programs assume that children are deficient in the area of social skills, therefore, by learning appropriate social skills unliked children's social status and resulting prognosis will likely improve. These treatment programs have demonstrated that more positive social behaviors can be learned by the targeted children. Yet, despite behavior improvements within the treatment setting, gains have not consistently generalized across settings or time and low social status is maintained. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of self-modeling as a social skill training and status improvement technique. Could the use of this technique decrease negative interactions and isolation while increasing positive interactions during the subject's recess play? Also evaluated was whether the treatment and resulting behavioral changes affected the subjects' sociometric status. This research utilized a multiple baseline across subjects design. Subjects were selected by peer nomination from grades one through three in a rural elementary school in western Massachusetts. Three children (2 second grade boys and 1 first grade girl) were selected from those identified as having low social status within their respective grade. The subjects were regular education students and did not exhibit any idiosyncratic behaviors that would set them apart from their peers. Observations and data collection were conducted during morning recess. Observations continued throughout the study and documented decreased rates of negative and isolate behavior and increased rates in positive interactions as a result of the treatment condition for two of the three subjects. Treatment consisted of the targeted children viewing videotapes of themselves playing appropriately with peers during recess. At the end of treatment the peer nomination instrument was again administered to assess whether changes in status accompanied the behavioral changes. Two subjects improved their rates of positive interaction and one of those two also significantly improved her social status. Results for the third subject are less clear. A trend toward the positive is evident but the study was ended before any clear pattern was established.

This qualitative case study identified possible causal/contributing factors in the suicidal behavior of several cases of Cape Verdean immigrant adolescents, and identified commonalities in this target group. Three Cape Verdean immigrant adolescent students who had manifested serious suicidal behavior, and three Cape Verdean immigrant adolescent students who had not exhibited such behavior participated in the study. A qualitative case study approach was utilized. The methodology of interviews and observations was employed. Students who had manifested serious suicidal behavior, were compared to each other and to students who had not exhibited suicidal behavior. The following research questions guided this study: (1) What possible causal/contributing factors are present in the case studies of students who had been suicidal? (2) What are the precipitating events in these cases of suicidal behavior? (3) Are there any commonalities in the causal/contributing factors in each of the cases studied? (4) What differences are noted when a comparison is made between the group of students that has exhibited suicidal behavior and the group that has not. It is this researcher's opinion that to a large degree, the Cape Verdean immigrant adolescents in this study exhibited suicidal behavior for the very same reasons that other young people manifest these behaviors. Serious family conflict, loss of loved ones through death and separation, feelings of isolation and rejection from family members and peers, and a lack of connectedness to a significant caretaker may have been the most overwhelming contributing factors. However, their experiences with emigration, culture shock, and racial/cultural/linguistic differences may have added just enough additional stressors to predispose them to a greater degree to suicidal behavior when the other more typical causal/contributing factors were present. The critical implication of the data from this study is that communities and schools need to join with families of the Cape Verdean immigrant population to develop strategies and programs to remedy this serious mental health issue.

This study explored whether there were enduring memory and attention deficits in a nonclinical group of undergraduate women who had experienced child sexual abuse (CSA). Thirty-five women who were severely (n=18) or moderately (n=17) sexually abused and eighteen control subjects volunteered for the study. Subjects were matched on race, age, and grade point average. Measures of implicit and explicit memory as well as two measures of attention were administered under both no-threat and threat conditions. The threat paradigm employed was the use of words judged by 7 independent clinicians as either "threatening" or "very threatening" to adult survivors of child sexual abuse. Measures of depression and dissociation were also administered. It was hypothesized that there would be no baseline memory and/or attention deficits in the CSA population but that the experience of either internally or externally generated CSA-related threat would have an intermittent negative effect on these cognitive functions effecting attentional and memory disruptions in ongoing tasks. It was further hypothesized that the severely abused subjects would experience more disruption in the threat condition than the moderately abused subjects. Depression and dissociation scores were analyzed to ascertain both their presence in the three groups and their relationship to performance on the memory and attention tests. Under the no-threat condition, the severely abused subjects showed significantly poorer implicit memory than the controls in a between-groups univariate analysis of variance. An analysis of covariance with depression and dissociation as covariates showed this deficit could be attributed to the severe group's significantly greater depression. Under the threat condition, between-groups ultivariate analyses of variance showed there were no significant findings of memory or attention deficits in the CSA subjects although within-group univariate analyses showed trends in the hypothesized direction for both implicit memory and attention. These findings suggest that while some women who were sexually abused as children have enduring implicit memory and attention deficits as sequelae, the experience of the abuse, itself, is not a sufficient predictor of these deficits.

When families of children who have experienced extra-familial sexual abuse are included in treatment, they are often seen by therapists who are viewed as experts using psychoeducational models. Such a framework does not emphasize how families discover their own resources or develop new meanings of their experiences. This study evaluated whether, and how, a program based on constructivist principles helped to empower a group of sexually abused boys and their families by creating a collaborative, rather than a hierarchical, therapeutic relationship. A post-treatment evaluation was performed by means of three semi-structured interviews and completion of two simple questionnaires. Through in-depth interviews with the boys and their families, information was gathered on the subjective experiences of the clients regarding both the abuse and the healing process. Themes were generated from the data in the final analysis to assess severity of PTSD symptoms and to describe the constructivist group process. A model was proposed for the treatment of extra-familial sexual abuse based on constructivist principles.

This study examined the perceptions that Virginia public high school counselors have towards the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) program in their schools. Specifically, four areas of research questions were addressed: (1) knowledge; (2) beliefs and attitudes about benefits to students; (3) the extent to which JROTC is recommended to all students; and (4) the appropriateness of JROTC for particular students. Data for this study were obtained from high school counselors in Virginia who were working in a school which offered JROTC as an elective. A questionnaire containing statements about the claims of JROTC was generated. The questionnaire contained a combination of true/false questions, Likert-type scale questions, a checklist of student characteristics, open-ended questions, and a final section on demographics. The investigator conducted follow-up interviews with school counselors at selected schools. Data analysis were relational and descriptive. Results indicated that school counselors were knowledgeable about the relationship between JROTC and the military. School counselors indicated that they were in general agreement with the claims of benefits to students by JROTC, and indicated a positive attitude about these benefits to students. School counselors identified specific characteristics of students for whom they would recommend JROTC. School counselors also indicated for whom JROTC is an appropriate elective, and for whom it may not be appropriate or feasible. It was concluded that school counselors have a generally positive perception towards JROTC in Virginia public schools. Recommendations for future research were presented. / Ph. D.

This study was designed to ascertain the current status of the use of music in the counseling work of elementary school counselors. The sample for this study consisted of counselors who were employed full-time as elementary school counselors, and who were current members of the Virginia Counselors Association. Data were collected through mailed survey packets consisting of a questionnaire regarding counselors' use of music over the past year, and a stamped, self-addressed return envelope. A total of 255 counselors were mailed survey materials. This mailing resulted in 147 usable returns. Overall, counselors indicated they used music in their work with students. Results showed the 73% of counselors who used music, incorporated it mostly into classroom guidance sessions with kindergarten through second graders, and used mostly commercially produced materials/activities. Respondent who used music were 90% female and 10% male, averaged over 16 years employment in the field of education, and averaged nearly 9 years as elementary school counselors. The majority were currently assigned to one school, and indicated previous elementary school teaching experience in the regular education area. These counselors strongly believed in the ability of music to improve: focus and maintenance of attention; group participation; student/counselor rapport; and retention of concepts taught. A large majority held masters degrees, and perceived themselves as very or somewhat proficient in the use of music as a counseling tool. Nearly all counselors indicated they had received no criticism for using music in their work. Nearly all survey respondents indicated graduate training in the use of music as a counseling tool as either existent but inadequate, or non-existent. Counselors also saw training through workshops as unavailable. Respondents, however, indicated a strong desire to pursue more training in the use of music as a counseling tool if it was available. Several recommendations were drawn from the study. These included: the need for more training in the use of music as a counseling tool in both graduate schools and professional workshops; the need for counselors to keep abreast of music materials/activities incorporating music which are, and will become available; and, the need for more research to measure the effects of music when used as a counseling tool with elementary school students. / Ed. D.