The purpose of this study was to investigate high school student achievement in child development concepts that are reflected in the Pennsylvania Family and Consumer Sciences Child Development Standards. A secondary goal of this research was to compare student achievement in child development concepts in child development courses that include a laboratory as an integral part of the course with achievement in child development courses that do not include a laboratory component. The design was a pretest-posttest experiment using an instrument which was developed for this study. The treatment was exposure to a high school semester-long family and consumer sciences course in child development. The subjects were 431 students from nine high schools in Pennsylvania. The experimental group consisted of two subgroups; one of the subgroups consisted of high school students enrolled in a semester-long child development course that was didactic in nature, without a child development laboratory experience. The second subgroup consisted of high school students enrolled in a semester-long child development course that was a combination of didactic instruction and experience in a child development laboratory. Students who were never enrolled in a child development course participated in the control group.
The findings from this study offer evidence that participation in a high school semester-long child development course has a positive effect on students knowledge of child development concepts. After the experimental group participated in a child development course, they differed significantly in their knowledge compared to the comparison group who did not participate in a child development course. A high school child development semester course, as evaluated in this study, does appear to have a significant impact on students knowledge of child development concepts. Students who took a child development course showed significant improvement on posttests compared to pretest scores.
Child development students who participated in a laboratory experience showed a significantly greater improvement on tests scores over child development students who took a didactic-style child development course with no laboratory experience.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-07052005-105659 |
| Date | 18 July 2005 |
| Creators | McCombie, Sally M |
| Contributors | Linda Nelson, Roger Klein, Karen Vander Ven, Louis Pingel |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-07052005-105659/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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