The purpose of the present study was to investigate Preservice Teachers' (PT) reasons for teaching and their beliefs about teaching. Specific reasons of PTs for entering the teaching career, and typologies (clusters) of PTs based on their reasons for teaching were investigated. Further, across the clusters of PTs, their beliefs about teaching were examined, in the context of PTs' understanding of their goals to become teachers. Mixed methods were used for data collection: survey and interviews. Participants were undergraduate students enrolled in the EDF 4210 Educational Psychology and EDF 4430 Classroom Assessment courses for the Spring semester 2007. The study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, 215 participants completed a survey about PTs' demographic data, PTs' reasons for teaching and their beliefs about teaching. An initial quantitative analysis of participants' responses for the Reasons for Teaching Questionnaire (RTQ) was made using factor analysis and cluster analysis to establish groups/clusters of individuals displaying similar patterns regarding their reasons for teaching. For the second phase of the study, a selected number of participants (n=25) from the three clusters were recruited for an in-depth interview. The purpose of the interviews was to explore more deeply PTs' understanding of their goal to become a teacher, as well as similarities and differences across the clusters. Overall, the study results indicated a variety of reasons for teaching and beliefs about teaching expressed by PTs in their survey and interview responses. Survey results indicated six main categories of reasons (i.e., factors) as influential to PTs' career choices. These were reasons related to PTs' identity issues, reasons related to PTs' subject matter, reasons related to PTs' meaningful relationships, reasons related to the teaching job benefits, reasons related to PTs' holistic views of profession and reasons related to job opportunities through teaching. Three different clusters of PTs were obtained by conducting a cluster analysis, and specific reasons were found to be relevant for each cluster as related to their teaching career choices. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and post hoc tests, conducted to further explore the differences across clusters of PTs regarding their beliefs about schooling and beliefs about the teaching career, showed significant differences across the three clusters of PTs. The interview results provided more support to understanding the interplay among PTs' motivation and beliefs about teaching in the context of their understanding of the teaching goal development. A grounded theory model was developed to represent PTs' understanding of their teaching goal development as related to four major categories: Motivators, Beliefs, Context, and Strategies. Results from this study showed that PTs' understanding of their goal development was related to different types (or combination) of motivators for teaching, specific beliefs about the teaching career, all these applied to a specific context (i.e., past school experiences, emotions etc). How PTs perceived themselves as teachers, and how they perceived teaching represented a major influence in their career choices. Research from this area can bring a significant contribution to understanding PTs' beliefs in connection with their reasons for teaching as related to their attitudes toward teaching and their future professional practices. From this perspective, the issue of teacher education quality programs can be addressed, and stress the importance of studying PTs' views of teaching as related to their future instructional practices. Findings from such research may also bring a contribution to understanding motivational aspects for continuing teaching and job satisfaction, and indirectly may provide support to understanding various teacher attrition issues. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2008. / Date of Defense: November 5, 2007. / Motivation, Teacher Education, Beliefs / Includes bibliographical references. / Jeannine E. Turner, Professor Directing Dissertation; Stacey Rutledge, Outside Committee Member; Alysia Roehrig, Committee Member; John Keller, Committee Member.

Previous research has indicated that school psychologists have greater job satisfaction when they engage in more intervention and consultation activities and fewer assessment activities. The use of response to intervention (RTI) as a way to identify specific learning disabilities is a recent development in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that involves more intervention activities for school psychologists and provides earlier interventions for students. The way that RTI is implemented may affect job satisfaction of school psychologists. Grounded in the theory of work adjustment, this study used a causal comparative design to examine if there is a significant difference between 2 models of RTI and job satisfaction of school psychologists in a southwestern US state. Survey data were collected using the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire from a convenience sample of school psychologists using a prescriptive model (leading to decisions of eligibility) of RTI (n = 26) and those using a flexible model (interventions and assessments to determine eligibility) of RTI (n = 26). ANOVA was conducted to determine if there were significant differences in school psychologists' job satisfaction, by group (flexible RTI vs. prescriptive RTI), years of experience (less than 6 years vs. 6 years or more), age (less than 40 years vs. 40 years and older), and gender (male vs. female). Results revealed similar levels of job satisfaction for school psychologists using both flexible and prescriptive models of RTI. Findings are important because they provide information about establishing and maintaining job satisfaction of school psychologists. This study may influence social change by assisting school districts in making decisions about RTI that directly impact educational outcomes for students.

<p> The sibling relationship is one of the longest lasting human relationships with significant influence on an individual&rsquo;s social and emotional functioning. The current study was designed to examine both personal and parental influences on the sibling relationships of emerging adults. Specifically, it tested the mediating role of fairness evaluations on the links between parental differential treatment, personality and the quality of sibling relationships. A theorized path model was developed, and tested using Structural Equation Modeling. A total of 775 undergraduates at a northeastern university, who nominated a &lsquo;target sibling&rsquo;, completed the Big Five Inventory, the Lifespan Sibling Relationship Scale, the Sibling Inventory of Differential Experience, and fairness of parenting ratings.</p><p> The results indicated that the individual&rsquo;s perception of parental differential treatment, and the extent to which they evaluated that treatment as fair, were important predictors of the quality of sibling relationships. Moreover, the individual&rsquo;s personality was related to perception of fairness as well as the quality of sibling relationships.</p><p> More specifically, unequal parental treatment was associated with poorer sibling relationships and higher perception of unfairness regarding this treatment. Individuals who perceived a lower degree of parental differential treatment were likely to evaluate these treatments as more fair, and to report better relationships with their siblings. Furthermore, participants who scored high on Openness, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness and low on Neuroticism were likely to have better relationships with their siblings. Moreover, participants who were high on Conscientiousness and low on Neuroticism tended to evaluate parental treatments as highly fair and were likely to report better relationships with their siblings.</p><p> Limitations of the current study and suggestions for future research, as well as some ways in which parents can encourage their children to evaluate parental treatment as fair, were discussed.</p>

<p> The internship is a critical part of graduate training and often the only opportunity to receive on-site clinical supervision during school psychology practice. Nonetheless, the process of pairing interns with field supervisors is not standardized and sometimes relies on factors such as logistics and supervisor credentials rather than a consideration of interpersonal variables that could optimize the internship experience. Related fields have found mixed evidence for a relationship between personality similarity within a supervisory dyad and outcomes such as a strong supervisory relationship, satisfaction with supervision, and supervisee effectiveness. This study examined the influence of personality similarity on ratings of supervisory working alliance, supervision satisfaction, and intern work readiness. This study also evaluated the predictive power of personality, supervisory working alliance, and systemic factors on intern work readiness and supervision satisfaction. Lastly, this study assessed the development of the supervisory working alliance and intern work readiness over time. </p><p> Twenty-six dyads were recruited for participation in this study, including 24 practicing school psychologists serving as field supervisors and 26 school psychology interns. Data collection occurred at the midpoint and end of the internship year. Participants completed a demographic questionnaire, personality inventory, and measures of supervisory working alliance, supervision satisfaction, supervisee work readiness, and systemic factors. </p><p> Results indicated that personality similarity among supervisors and interns is not related to supervisory working alliance, supervision satisfaction, or supervisee work readiness. However, supervisor ratings of supervisory working alliance were predictive of intern work readiness, and intern ratings of supervisory working alliance were predictive of supervision satisfaction. Systemic factors were not predictive of intern work readiness or supervision satisfaction. For supervisors, the supervisory working alliance significantly decreased over time, while intern ratings remained consistent from midyear to the end of the year. Intern development from midyear to the end of year could not be determined due to low scale reliability. Future studies should further examine factors that contribute to the supervisory working alliance and validate measures specific to the school context. More research is needed to establish the conditions and interpersonal characteristics that enable an optimal internship experience for both supervisors and supervisees in school psychology.</p>

published_or_final_version / abstract / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

<p> To understand the influence of self-efficacy on academic achievement, it is first necessary to assess the construct with reliability and validity. Although this has been done extensively in the Western context, studies on the reliability and validity of self-efficacy scores in Asian contexts have been scarce. The goal of this study is to develop a Mathematics self-efficacy scale with sound psychometric properties that can be used in future studies to advance our knowledge on the nature of self-efficacy in different cultural contexts. In this study, I described the development of a mathematics self-efficacy scale and present data on the reliability and structural validity of the scores in a sample of Singaporean adolescents (<i>N</i> = 1, 572). Results indicated that scale scores had strong internal consistency. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses suggested that there were two related but distinguishable self-efficacy variables: content-specific and general. There was also evidence for convergent validity, given the significant and positive correlations between the self-efficacy scores and related constructs. As was found in other studies, the difference between gender and the three self-efficacy scores was statistically but not practically significant for content-specific self-efficacy; there was not statistical difference in the general or combined self-efficacy scores. Finally, regression analyses suggested that self-efficacy scores made significant contributions to mathematics grade, even after taking into account the contributions of past achievement and other attitudinal constructs. Further research is needed to address the limitations and to ascertain the generalizability of these findings.</p>

<p> Middle school students were instructed about the concept of metacognition in the classroom setting in order to investigate the differences in science content learning. This study investigated two research questions, first does teaching students about metacognition change their content learning in science, and second does teaching students about metacognition create self-regulated learners in the science classroom. This study compared both survey results and assessment scores to measure changes after treatment for both control and treatment groups across content scores and the survey categories of test anxiety, cognitive strategy use, and self-regulation. Statistical differences were found between groups after treatment in 2 of 3 of the survey categories; self-regulation and cognitive strategy use, and post assessment scores. Overall findings suggest that regular implementation of learning strategies used for metacognition may be beneficial to help students become more independent learners in the science classroom.</p>

<p> This work explores some key questions associated with designing games to foster empathy. First, how can design practice build on the understandings of empathy that have been developed in a variety of disciplines? Although empathy has been thoroughly studied in many fields, the lack of standardized nomenclature makes it difficult to apply knowledge from one to the next. Here, I present a theoretical framework that helps organize and explain research on empathy across disciplines. I also use the framework to propose heuristic best practices for designing games to foster empathy. </p><p> Second, what does &ldquo;empathetic play&rdquo; look and feel like, and how does it impact the player? In the research presented here, 81 participants played the game Layoff. Some were prompted to play &ldquo;empathetically,&rdquo; while others received no prompting. Both quantitative and qualitative findings suggest that the experience of empathetic play is distinct from that of entertainment-focused play, and that empathetic play produces distinct attitudinal and behavioral consequences. Specific findings include the following: </p><p> 2. Empathetic players approached in-game decisions as moral dilemmas, while entertainment-focused players were much less likely to engage with the game on moral terms. </p><p> 3. Empathetic players were much more likely to experience emotional states that have been associated with empathy in prior research, i.e., empathetic concern and personal distress. </p><p> 4. Empathetic players were more likely to associate their own histories with people represented in the game. </p><p> 5. Once the game was over, players who had been prompted to engage empathetically donated more of their remuneration to a charity serving victims of economic hardship. </p><p> Overall, these results suggest that (a) players will not reliably adopt an empathetic (as opposed to entertainment-focused) posture without some form of prompting, and that (b) empathetic engagement inside of a game can encourage altruistic behavior in the world outside the game.</p>

<p> Educators have long been interested in how students react differently to failure experiences. What makes one student expend more effort after an academic failure, but another avoids effort or academic engagement? One avenue of research in this area has examined the influence of students&rsquo; achievement goals on their response to academic success or failure. This study sought to examine how students with various multiple goal profiles react to an imagined failure situation with respect to four outcome-focused achievement emotions (i.e., hope, anxiety, shame, &amp; hopelessness) and effort. A <i>k</i>-means cluster analysis of the four AGQ-R scales produced three multiple goal profiles: Mastery High, High All Goals, and Average All Goals. Findings revealed that students in the Mastery High and High All Goals profiles reported significantly higher intended effort after the imagined failure experience in comparison to students with the Average All Goals profile. The findings appear to highlight overall protective benefit of holding high levels of mastery-approach goals, as high levels of performance-avoidance goals did not have negative effect on effort after a recent failure experience when coupled with high mastery-approach goals. Significant differences in achievement emotions between the cluster groups were not found. The results of this study are integrated with current theory, and implications for theory and practice are addressed.</p>

Based on the results of a prior field study, it was determined that an instrument that borrows from Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development could be constructed and reliably used to measure assessor competence in the use of a career counseling assessment instrument in career counselor training. This research further explores the feasibility of validating this instrument. If successful, a training template could be created to provide competency measurement for the remediation of counselors in training and the improvement of counselor training models. The theoretical model upon which the instrument is based is the Piagetian Matrix of Test User Competence (PMTUC). The competency assessment instrument based on this theoretical matrix was named A Measure of Assessor Competence (AMAC). The AMAC produces one global score based on six test items. The long-term intent of this line of research is to promote the utility of the PMTUC in the creation of a variety of measures of competency (AMACs) across many psychological assessments. The PMTUC theory and the resulting AMAC instruments could be applicable to all instruments. The specific intent of this study was to validate the use of the AMAC in the creation of a measure of competency in the use of a career counseling instrument. The instrument selected for this validation research was the Career Thoughts Inventory (CTI) because experts in the use of this instrument were readily available. Therefore, the measure of assessor competency for this specific research study is the AMAC-CTI. Future studies might attempt to build measures of competency in the use of the MMPI-2 (AMAC-MMPI-2), Rorschach (AMAC-Rorschach), or perhaps the WISC-IV (AMAC-WISC-IV). To validate the AMAC-CTI instrument, five studies were conducted. Study 1 involved expert ratings of the importance of the six items in the AMAC-CTI using an Expert Content Rating Form. The experts in the field of counseling and career development were identified by the Director of Clinical Training in a Combined Doctoral Program in Counseling Psychology and School Psychology at a large university in the southeastern United States. For this study, persons were considered experts if they had at least 10 years experience in the field of career counseling, held faculty positions, currently supervised graduate students in career counseling, and had served as a supervisor for the student administration of at least two hundred Career Thoughts Inventories. All five experts agreed that the items on the AMAC-CTI were important to critically important. Studies 2, 3, and 4 involved expert raters, graduate students, and professionals in the field of counseling and career development. The graduate students were enrolled in a Combined Counseling Psychology and School Psychology doctoral program or the Mental Health Counseling masters program at a large southeastern university who have been trained in the use of the CTI. The professionals work in the field of counseling psychology and have also been trained in the use of the CTI. Participants were approached via face-to-face request, e-mail request, or telephone by either the primary investigator of this dissertation or the aforementioned Director of Clinical Training about volunteering for a study of trainee competency using assessments. Once persons agreed to participate, they were contacted via e-mail by the primary investigator and were directed via e-mail to access a web link provided by www.surveymonkey.com. Once participants accessed the link, they were introduced to the survey and presented with an electronic consent form and, upon agreeing to participate, a background questionnaire. Participants provided responded to six open-ended format questions which were assumed to correspond to the 6 primary determinants of test user competence. At the conclusion of the survey collection process, responses to surveys were redacted of personal identification information and given to expert raters to perform ratings using the AMAC-CTI. For Study 2, inter-rater reliability coefficients and measures of internal consistency were derived to confirm the reliability of the instrument. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) determined that the AMAC-CTI is a uni-dimensional instrument. Study 3 was conducted to examine the difficulty of the instrument. The open-ended portion of the survey required respondents to answer six detailed questions that corresponded to the six items that make up the AMAC-CTI. Based on the results of this research project, the performance tasks were determined to be somewhat difficult. Study 4 assessed convergent validity by asking the student participants' clinical supervisors to rate their respective students' competency in the use of the CTI. Supervisors used the same evaluation criteria as the AMAC-CTI to assess their students. The student participants' overall AMAC-CTI scores were then correlated with the overall ratings provided by their respective clinical supervisors. It was hypothesized that these scores would be correlated, but statistical analyses failed to show a significant relationship. For Study 5, analyses were performed to examine the relationship between AMAC-CTI scores and education and between AMAC-CTI scores and experience in the use of the CTI. AMAC-CTI ratings were positively correlated with experience in the use of the CTI, but were not correlated with education level and the number of assessment courses completed by participants. Implications for further test development and counselor training of assessment skills are discussed. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008. / Date of Defense: July 26, 2007. / Counselor Training, Career Thoughts Inventory, Clinical Training / Includes bibliographical references. / Gary W. Peterson, Professor Directing Dissertation; Richard L. Tate, Outside Committee Member; Briley Proctor, Committee Member; R William English, Committee Member.