Thesis (M.A.)--Rowan University, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Rowan University, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

The problem of this thesis is the degree of aspiration (level of aspiration) exhibited by students with high or low levels of academic performance. With these levels established by the use of a standardized test designed for this purpose, this study is concerned more specifically with testing two hypotheses.

As individuals, college students make choices that both reflect their past lives and constitute their futures. In this research I examine the ways five college sophomores built their lives in the complex world of a research university campus. Using case study analysis I look at how the students negotiated the considerable academic and social demands of their daily lives. College impact models and literature about theories of practice and decision making inform the analysis. Human agency and fields of practice help to explain the behaviors of these students. The research reveals that students take a myriad of paths to negotiate the intricacies of the college context and construct their lives, but that they are guided along those paths by their goals for the future. I interviewed five sophomores at a Doctoral/Extensive university repeatedly over one semester. I discovered that their families and their pre-college academic experiences mattered throughout their first few semesters as they learned to play the college game. Survival depended on their backgrounds, their skills, and the strategies they used to adapt to their new environment. The extent and quality of their interaction with peers, faculty, and other adults on campus also reflected their instrumentalism and indicated their efforts to find a space within the larger campus. Their adjustment to the field of the academy showed a commitment to vocational goals in the long and short term. My analysis illuminates the idiosyncratic process of choosing a major and the nature of a students commitment to a discipline. Taken together, these categories of student life show a complex building process with some similarities and many individual variations.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. / Advisor: Bert Goldman; submitted to the School of Education. Title from PDF t.p.(viewed May 28, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-83).

A survey was performed to compare basic health education knowledge between sophomore students at Utah State University and sophomore students at the University of Utah . This was performed through the use of a questionnaire consisting of 40 questions covering the following eight areas of prominence in health education: 1. Alcohol and tobacco 2. Community health and communicable disease 3. Consumer health 4. Drugs and narcotics 5. Food fads and medical quackery 6. Mental health 7. Personal health 8. Sex education This questionnaire was administered through the mail to 250 randomly selected students at the two universities. When responses were received they were scored and keypunched on IBM-5080 cards . The cards were then processed through the IBM-350 Model 44 computer using Analysis of Variance and the Quest Program. Computation of student "T 11 scores verified that students at the University of Utah were superior in health knowledge at the .05 level of significance based on the one tailed test. The University of Utah last year required a basic health education class of all freshmen . At Utah State University such a class is not required or even offered. The f act that University of Utah students were superior verified that positive learning of health education did increase through specific instruction.

No description available.

No description available.

College student retention has been described as a puzzle because retention rates have stagnated, and in some cases declined, despite over seventy years of research into the problem. The magnitude of the problem is that 50 percent of college students will leave their institution before obtaining a degree (Braxton, Hirschy, & McClendon, 2011). In an effort to improve retention rates, colleges and universities have concentrated their attention on first year students. But this concentrated strategy may have simply transferred the retention problem into the second year where retention rates for many schools are as low as first year rates (Amaury, Barlow, & Crisp, 2005). While advising practices have been identified as one of the three top contributors to increasing retention, major gaps exist about the role academic advising might play in the retention of second year students. The present correlational study was undertaken to fill gaps in the mostly conceptual second year literature base which implies second year students differ from first year and upper division students. Advising formed the focus of the study because advising has been identified as one of the most important methods for putting students into a mentoring relationship with college staff and faculty, a practice with strong ties to retention (Habley & McClanahan, 2004; Kuh, 2008). Six research questions were posed in the study which asked whether second year students differed from first year and upper division students and whether retained second year students differed from not retained second year students in their attitudes toward and experiences with advising. Using simultaneous and logistic regression models, and controlling for confounding variables, statistically significant differences were found between second year students and their first year and upper division peers as well as between retained second year students and not retained second year students. The findings of difference between second year and other students provide the growing second year retention literature with an empirical basis to support previously held assumptions about difference between class years which had also formed the basis for presumptions about practice for second year success and retention. Many of the findings in this study also support present retention and second year research and prescriptions for practice provided by that research.