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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8287 |
| Date | 01 January 1992 |
| Creators | Herron, Mary Anne |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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