Supported employment has been shown to be an effective way to contribute to the community reintegration of persons with disabilities. Traditionally, the hiring practice for supported employment staffs has focused on individuals with social service training; however, it has been proposed that employment specialists need to possess advanced skills that tend to be emphasized in business training programs. This study uses several new measures to identify differences in attitudes toward vocational rehabilitation and readiness and aptitude for a supported employment position, of social service and business students. Results indicate that social service students possess higher levels of clinical readiness and aptitude and more favorable attitudes toward vocational rehabilitation than do business students. Nevertheless, business students' readiness, attitudes, and aptitude are above theoretical neutral points, and comparable to those of social service students, and thus, effort should be devoted to diversifying the workforce by recruiting individuals with business training. / Department of Psychological Science

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, November, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

The aim of this study was to validate an instrument that can be used by instructors or social scientist who are interested in evaluating statistics anxiety. The psychometric properties of the English version of the Statistical Anxiety Scale (SAS) was examined through a confirmatory factor analysis of scores from a sample of 323 undergraduate social science majors enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States. In previous studies, the psychometric properties of the Spanish and Italian versions of the SAS were validated; however, the English version of the SAS had never been assessed. Inconsistent with previous studies, scores on the English version of the SAS did not produce psychometrically acceptable values of validity. However, the results of this study suggested the potential value of a revised two-factor model SAS to measure statistics anxiety. Additionally, the Attitudes Towards Statistics (ATS) scale was used to examine the convergent and discriminant validities of the two-factor SAS. As expected, the correlation between the two factors of the SAS and the two factors of the ATS uncovered a moderately negative correlation between examination anxiety and attitudes towards the course. Additionally, the results of a structural regression model of attitudes towards statistics as a predictor of statistics anxiety suggested that attitudes towards the course and attitudes towards the field of statistics moderately predicts examination anxiety with attitudes towards the course having the greatest influence. It is recommended that future studies examine the relationship between attitudes towards statistics, statistics anxiety, and other variables such as academic achievement and instructional style.

How to motivate students effectively is a question teachers have asked for thousands ofyears. In my teaching program at Malmö University, a variety of teaching methods andapproaches, that also increase motivation, have come into focus. These include:teaching at the right level, using a variety of teaching methods, seeing every student,being enthusiastic about the material, using formative evaluation, connecting lessons tostudents’ everyday life, and adapting classes to students’ interests. The aim of this studyis to find out how secondary students in a social science program perceive teachingmethods and approaches aimed at increasing motivation, and determine which methodsthey perceive as most/least effective. The study used both qualitative and quantitativemethods. 23 upper-secondary students from a class at a school in southern Swedenwere interviewed in four focus groups, where participants were purposefully sampled.10 of these students were also asked to complete a questionnaire ranking the teachingmethods and approaches on a scale of 1-7 (where 1 was most effective at increasingmotivation and 7 least effective), and the mean values of these scores were used in theanalysis. A phenomenological approach and content analysis were used to code andanalyze the data. Students perceived all of the motivational methods to be effective, themost effective being teaching lessons at the right level, followed by using a variety ofteaching methods, with mean values of 1.9 and 3.2, respectively. Adapting lessons tostudents’ interests and connecting them to everyday life were the least effective, withmean values of 5.6 and 5.7, respectively. The categories of teachers having a positiveattitude towards the material and the students, and seeing every student, had the samemean value, 3.8, while formative evaluation had a mean value of 3.9. When trying tomotivate students, it would thus appear more effective to make sure that lessons aretaught at the right level and that teachers vary the lessons, than to adapt lessons tostudents’ interests or connect the material to everyday life. While this was a small studyand the findings cannot be generalized to school populations, they are of high interestfor the researcher.

Conducting research responsibly is an essential part of ethical research (Steneck & Bulger, 2007). When research is not conducted responsibly, the result is often research misconduct, which may cause harm to research participants (Aita & Richer, 2005). Although numerous methods and policies have been developed, both to prevent and to deal with research misconduct, such effects are ongoing (Howard Stone, 2001). A study conducted in the United States of America (USA) by Heitman, Olsen and Anestidou (2007) suggested that postgraduate biomedical students did not have sufficient knowledge of conducting research responsibly. This study aimed to adapt Heitman et al.’s (2007) study to social science postgraduate students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Although findings indicated that the participants had adequate knowledge of conducting research responsibly, the variables hypothesised to have an impact on the results – such as age, research experience, and research training – did not produce any significant findings. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2010.