The purpose of this research was to study a sociocognitive “student/parent/peer authoring community” called Traveling Books (TBks) in kindergarten and second grade in a public elementary school setting. TBks are teacher-made vehicles for involving parents in peer-based literacy environments. The study was based on Epstein's theory that increasing overlap of students' spheres of influence, home, school, and community, creates a greater likelihood that children will learn what the parents want them to learn. The aim was to locate essential elements that triggered learning processes to occur and to discover research-based fundamentals still missing from TBks. This qualitative inquiry incorporated the framework of Dr. Elliot Eisner‘s Educational Criticism with five distinctive dimensions (intentional, structural, curricular, pedagogical, and evaluative) to guide the analysis of TBk procedures. A purposive sample of six Utah teachers from rural and inner city classrooms participated with 251 students in 12 groups for 2½ years. Data were gathered from interviews, classroom observations, surveys, and artifacts. My role was researcher and participant/observer. What I found was that motivation for authoring increased when parents (or parent figures) contributed simple family knowledge to the TBks. Most parents indicated that their child‘s “favorite” TBks were those that had required the most parent involvement. A few parents, however, described frustration with their role in facilitating TBks with their child. Seven vignettes described the complex and subtle qualities found in TBk sociocognitive environments and its effect on struggling, average, gifted, and behaviorally handicapped children, and longitudinal effects on former students. Despite increased commitments, most teachers reported a lighter workload overall using TBks to augment their existing literacy programs. A sense of urgency to proceed with internet development for TBk facilitation was expressed. Options were explored for developing internet assisted training for teachers and parents. Twelve essential elements were identified and a TBks instructional model was developed. A clearer understanding of the educational philosophy behind TBks resulted in the design of a prototype tool to engage parents in TBks through interactive home writing. This study raised important questions about characteristics of optimal support for facilitating TBks and about fundamentals still missing for broader implementation.

Hypertension is defined as an asymptomatic disease which means that the disease is not related to the experience of physical symptoms. This illness is mainly managed by means of oral drug therapies, but research shows that many patients fail to take their medication as they should. Non-compliance is the main problem associated with drug-related treatments, specifically amongst patients diagnosed with chronic conditions, such as hypertension. Past research has focused on many different factors accounting for the high occurrence of non-compliance. Psychological factors relate to patients’ beliefs about their diagnosed illness and their prescribed treatment regimen. These beliefs are conceptualized in terms of the self-regulation model as constituting 5 main dimensions: identity or symptoms of their illness, the consequences of their illness, timeline or specifically referring to the course of the illness (chronic or acute), causes of the illness and controllability. Compliance is vital in the treatment and management of hypertension and research attempting to understand the relation between compliance and patients’ illness cognitions are thus important. The already high prevalence of this condition coupled with an increase in the number of people reporting low compliance suggests the need for intervention. The research question informing the present study was based on the role that psychological factors play in impacting patients’ medication-taking patterns. The medication adherence model describes medication compliance in terms of purposeful action, patterned behaviour and feedback. Purposeful action concerns patients’ intentional decisions to take their medication while patterned behaviour relates to the medication-taking patterns that patients develop. The feedback dimension guides the medication-taking patterns, providing feedback about blood pressure for example. The theory informing the present study involved social cognitive theory, which highlights the role of self-efficacy and outcome expectancies. Self-efficacy is linked with feelings of personal control and specifically refers to people’s belief in their ability to perform certain actions that will produce desired outcomes. Outcome expectancies are described as people’s ability to consider the consequences of their actions and using this information to direct their behaviour. Bearing in mind these two aspects of social cognitive theory, patients’ belief in their ability to conform to their medication instructions together with their expectations that it will improve their health will direct their medication-taking behaviour (i.e. their compliance). The illness-perception questionnaire-revised and the medication-taking questionnaire were used to obtain information about patients’ illness cognitions and their medication compliance. The correlational findings as well as the results produced by regression analysis revealed that, although illness cognitions can play a determining role in patients’ compliance, the present findings found no relation between how patients take their medication and psychological factors, defined in terms of the self-regulation model. Only one of the factors used during factor analysis revealed to significantly predict medication. Limitations associated with the present study might account for this finding and it is recommended that future research should focus on a larger sample and also use supplementary assessment measures in conjunction with self-report measures. Copyright / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Psychology / unrestricted

Each month, thousands of U.S service members are discharged from the military and are forced to make the decision of what to do with the rest of their lives. For an increasingly large percentage of such veterans, the decision that they will make will be to become full-time college students and pursue an education that will provide them with meaningful careers. Unfortunately, due to the type of constant deployment cycles that many student-veterans undergo while enlisted/commissioned, a large percentage of veterans taking part in the military-to-college transition process have received mental/physical injuries that serve as major obstacles for achieving successful transitions. Specifically, this study seeks to determine if social support, willingness towards campus communication, self-esteem, and eagerness towards social networking site usage are related to a student-veterans overall level of academic engagement. This study draws its data from a sample of 202 full-time student-veterans. Data was collected through a volunteer self-administered online questionnaire. Six sections respectively measured eagerness towards SNS (Social Networking Site) usage, academic engagement, social support, willingness towards campus communication, self-esteem, and demographic information. Data was collected from California community colleges, California State Universities institutions, University of California institutions, and California private non-for profit institutions. This study found a statistically significant positive relationship between social support, self-esteem, willingness to communicate, and academic engagement. Essentially, student-veterans who have high levels of social support/self-esteem and are willing to communicate are more likely to possess high levels of academic engagement. There was no significant relationship found between eagerness towards SNS usage and academic engagement. Moreover, this study is significant as it suggests that a student-veteran’s level of academic engagement is positively correlated to their overall level of academic engagement. Thus, maintaining strong social support networks that allow student-veterans to interact in personal and one-on-one interactions is of great importance for a student-veteran during their time in college in order to achieve their academic and professional goals.

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One of the most problematic issues facing community colleges is developmental education. In the last decade, more research has been conducted examining developmental education. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of developmental math in a rural community college setting. Is developmental math an effective intervention? This study consisted of first time college students who took the COMPASS placement exam and scored 18-48. Students who scored 18-33 were placed in Math 098 (N=241) and received the developmental intervention. Math 098 is a semester-long course designed to prepare students for college-level math coursework, and it served as the intervention. Students who scored 34-48 were placed in Math 100 (N=469) and did not receive the developmental intervention. Because this represents a bandwidth close to a cut-score, these 2 groups are viewed as equivalent (Trochim, 2008). The initial intent of the study was to implement a regression-discontinuity design, but this failed to meet two necessary conditions. The researcher then executed an ANOVA, a series of chi-square goodnes-ofit procedures, and 2 binary logistic regressions in order to determine if any significant differences and/or relationship existed between treatment and control groups. Data were collected for this retrospective, quantitative research study from the Office of Institutional Effectiveness at the selected site. The selected site represents a medium-sized, rural community college located in the South. The findings in this study illustrate that those students who received the develomental intervention reported a statistically significant higher cummulative college GPAs than those who did not. The findings also illustrated that a statistically significant difference existed in regards to grades. Therefore, there was a statistically significant difference in grade distribution between both groups. When withdrawals and grades were evaluated together, no statistically significant distribution was observed. Two binary logisitic regressions were also conducted. No relationships were statistically significant between groups regarding Math 100 pass/fail rates or Math 100 completion rates. The researcher concluded that the findings suggest that Math 098 is an effective treatment for student achievement. The researcher recommended execution of more studies that replicate this model and examine rural populations.

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