The Effects of Self-Monitoring and Performance Feedback on the Treatment Integrity of Behavior Support Plan Implementation
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Educational Psychology
This study evaluated methods to improve and maintain treatment integrity (TI) for behavior support plans (BSP) for children with Autistic Disorder. While performance feedback (PFB) has been identified as the most effective method to support TI, it is time-consuming and expensive. This study examined self-monitoring (SM) as a way to maintain target levels of TI, possibly better than a PFB package that does not include SM. This study also examined generalization effects of training to a BSP for which no training occurred. Finally, this study explored the relationship of TI to student behavior. A four-tiered multiple baseline design with changing conditions was used to evaluate the effectiveness of SM compared to SM and PFB. Eight students with BSPs participated in the study. Teachers were trained with SM and PFB for four of the students' BSPs; the remaining four students were used to assess generalization effects of the training. Results indicate that SM was effective for two teachers to maintain target levels of TI following PFB, and sufficient for one teacher to achieve target levels of TI with no PFB. One teacher in the study required additional PFB to attain target levels of TI. Findings indicate that three of the four teachers generalized BSP implementation without additional training. It was also found that TI and student behavior are highly correlated.
Enhancing self-regulated learning on a novel mathematical task through modeling and feedback
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Educational Psychology
The power of feedback has been widely acclaimed in research on learning and motivation. However, in educational practice, feedback has typically been conceptualized as an outcome of learning efforts, and not enough attention has been given to its self-reflective role--as a beginning point in cyclical self-regulatory efforts to understand, motivate, and improve one's efforts to learn. This experimental study investigated the influence of various forms of feedback on college students' strategic efforts to learn to solve complex math problems.
Parental knowledge and beliefs in relation to early child development: Perspectives from Tanzania
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Educational Psychology
The study assessed mothers' knowledge and beliefs about child development and compared these results to their children's performance on a child outcome measure. It was conducted under the auspices of Save the Children, the non-profit agency. Data was gathered in both rural and urban areas of Tanzania, and included typically developing children, and children identified with developmental delays. The study also examined the relationship between the mothers' income and education levels and their knowledge and beliefs in respect to child development, the relationship between parenting style and self-efficacy beliefs, the development of the construct of self-efficacy in the Tanzanian context, and the effects of birth location and maternal age on child developmental outcome. Participants included 103 mothers and their children. Forty-nine resided in the urban location and 54 in the rural location. Parental knowledge and belief were assessed using the Health and Safety, Milestone and Parenting subscales from the Knowledge of Infant Development Inventory (MacPhee, 1981), the Maternal Self-Efficacy Scale (Teti & Gelfand, 1991), the Parenting Tasks Checklist (Sanders & Wooley, 2005), and the Parent Modernity Scale (Schaefer & Edgerton, 1985). Child developmental outcome was assessed using the Battelle Developmental Inventory Screening Test (Newborg, 2005). All measures were translated into Kiswahili and piloted on a small sample. Results indicated that a combined measure of parent beliefs was more reliable than results from the individual measures, however no relationship was found between scores on this combined measure and results on the child outcome measure. Significant differences were found in the scores of all the parent measures between mothers from urban versus rural areas of the country when controlling for other demographic variables. There was also a positive relationship between maternal education and scores on the combined belief measure. Item analyses on the measures highlighted parental beliefs about child-care and child development within the Tanzanian context. Findings from the study demonstrate the lack of intervention services for children with disabilities/developmental delays in rural areas of the country and highlighted the health and policy implications associated with this.
Knowledge and Use of Vowel Letter-Sound Relations by Beginners to Read and Spell Words
Author:
Simone Nunes de Carvalho
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Educational Psychology
The objective of this study was to explore beginners' knowledge of short vowel letter-sounds and its relationship to children's word reading and spelling abilities. Twenty-four five and six-year-old children completed several tasks assessing knowledge of vowel letter-sound and sound-letter associations, word and pseudoword reading, and spelling. Performance on the vowel tasks was used to separate children into high and low vowel knowledge groups. All children learned to read two sets of simplified spelling words to criterion: one set with vowels, and the other set without. It was expected that children with high vowel knowledge would learn words containing vowels faster and with more ease than words without vowels, whereas children with less vowel knowledge would learn words without vowel letters with more ease.
THE ROLE OF GOAL SETTING AND AUTOMATICITY IN NOVICE ATHLETES' DEVELOPMENT AND PERFORMANCE OF A TENNIS SKILL: A COACHING INTERVENTION
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Educational Psychology
This dissertation tested the varying branches of research that have explored the issue of automaticity and its relation to goals in sports. One view shows support for a process avoidance perspective on athletic skill development. Another contends that skill development is enhanced when deliberate attention is paid to the execution of a skill's sub-processes. A third social-cognitive view is represented in the current dissertation. This view is reflected in self-regulation theory and suggests that, while both views are valid, the learner must be capable of shifting adaptively from processes to outcomes following extended practice for optimal skill development to occur. Extended attention to processes and attributing errors to strategy are both proposed to represent expert self-regulatory practice methods. Forty novice participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: a) Extended Process, b) Intermediate Process, c) Self-Shifting, or, d) Outcome Goal. Each group received identical demonstrations of a beginner forehand tennis stroke, followed by sixty attempts at the stroke. The Extended Process Group attended to process goals for forty of sixty attempts then shifted to outcome goals for the final twenty attempts. The Intermediate Process Group attended to processes for twenty attempts then shifted to outcome goals for the remaining forty attempts. The Outcome Goal Group attended to outcomes throughout the sixty attempts. A Self-Shifting Group determined for itself when to shift from processes to outcomes. Results generally supported hypotheses, with the Extended Process Group outperforming other groups on measures of forehand skill and accuracy, in particular following the final phase of practice.
Teaching Reading: The Contribution of Multisensory Training to the Knowledge and Thinking of First-Grade Teachers
Author:
Constance Petropoulos
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Educational Psychology
Studies by Moats (1995), Mather, Bos, and Babur (2001), and McCutchen, et al (2002) have begun to identify the relationship between teachers' linguistic knowledge and what is known, scientifically, about how literacy is acquired by learners. Findings from these studies support the idea that linguistic knowledge--particularly knowledge of English phonology and orthography--is important for teachers of reading and can improve student outcomes in the early elementary grades. Moats (1995) and Mather et al (2001) found that teacher participants in their studies did not have the levels of linguistic knowledge that would enable expert teaching of reading.
Too Few Symptoms to Diagnose? A Managed Care Ethical Dilemma
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Educational Psychology
Managed care rations health care to populations by using gate keeping methods to counterbalance cost. Subsequently, managed care dictates treatment decisions made by practitioners. Managed care has been implicated in damaging relationships within the clinical practice of psychology that unethical and fraudulent practitioner behaviors, and undesirable the client-practitioner relationships. The present study built on the design and results from the pilot study. It was an attempt to explore the relationship between managed care and psychologists' &rsquo: unethical behaviors, and understand the characteristics, specifically empathy and narcissism, of psychologists who behave unethically when assigning diagnosis required by managed care companies. Of particular interest to this research was an examination of individuals who report incongruous personal ethical personal standards and behaviors. The pilot study revealed a sample of the participants who reported that they acted ethically and abided by professional ethical standards all of the time. These same individuals also reported that they would incorrectly diagnose a client who did not meet diagnostic requirements to receive payment for services through managed care. Participants included 101 mental health practitioners. Data were collected with an online survey, that included measures of personal characteristics, professional ethics, empathy (Spreng et al., 2009), narcissism (Corry et al., 2008), motivated reasoning, and diagnostic decisions. Correlational analyses indicated that personal and professional characteristics are positively related to practitioners reporting that there are reasons to assign unmerited diagnoses to clients. Conjoint analysis, using logistic regression, indicated that practitioners who reported that there are reasons to assign unmerited diagnoses to clients and unwavering adherence to the APA ethics code most frequently assigned unmerited diagnoses to fictional clients. A sub-group of the participants from the current work again reported that they acted ethically and abided by professional ethical standards all of the time but demonstrated unethical behavior. This finding and practitioner individual differences related to diagnostic behavior are both topics for fruitful future research.
The Effectiveness of Intervention Programs To Help College Students Acquire Self-Regulated Learning Strategies: A Meta-Analysis
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Educational Psychology
A meta-analysis was conducted to determine the effectiveness of interventions designed to help college students acquire self-regulated learning strategies. Fifty-five primary studies were included in the analysis, and ninety-three effect sizes were calculated and grouped into three outcome categories: academic achievement, strategy use, and self-efficacy. Total sample size consisted of 6, 669 students. The overall weighted effect size (Hedge's g) for all studies was 0.335 (95% CI = 0.240, 0.431), a significant small to medium effect. Interventions were coded based on their theoretical bases: metacognitive, social-cognitive, motivational, or an integration of these. Moderator analyses were conducted on several variables: content area, group work, type of assessment instrument, computer-mediated instruction, type of college/university, randomization of subjects, and intervention length. These analyses showed different effect sizes, although moderators accounted for little of the between-studies variation. Educational implications and recommendations for future research are proposed.
Improving Fifth Grade Students' Mathematics Self-Efficacy Calibration and Performance through Self-Regulation Training
Author:
Darshanand Ramdass
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Educational Psychology
This primary goal of this study was to investigate the effects of strategy training and self-reflection, two subprocesses of Zimmerman's cyclical model of self-regulation, on fifth grade students' mathematics performance, self-efficacy, self-evaluation, and calibration measures of self-efficacy bias, self-efficacy accuracy, self-evaluation bias, self-evaluation accuracy, time, and strategy use. The participants were 88 fifth graders and the task involved subtraction fraction problems. Students were randomly assigned to one of four groups, strategy training and self-reflection training, strategy training only, self-reflection training only, and the control group.
Effects of Teacher Efficacy and Student's Gender and Ethnicity on Special Education Referral and Response to Intervention
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Educational Psychology
This study examined the relationships among teacher efficacy, student gender, and student ethnicity (African American, Asian American, Latin American, and Caucasian) on teachers' decisions to use RTI versus referring immediately to special education. Kindergarten through eighth-grade teachers (N = 134) completed an anonymous survey online that included demographic questions, the Teachers' Sense of Teacher Efficacy Scale (TSES; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001), a hypothetical case study of a student struggling academically, and questions about teacher referral decisions. Participants randomly received one of the eight hypothetical case studies that varied the student's gender and ethnicity. This study employed procedures similar to earlier studies (Meijer & Foster, 1998; Podell & Soodak, 1993; Soodak & Podell, 1993) that manipulated student characteristics. Results support previous research studies that found that high teacher efficacy relates to fewer special education referrals. Multiple logistic regression analyses show that teachers with higher teacher efficacy in student engagement and instructional strategies were more likely to use RTI versus referring to special education. Teacher efficacy for classroom management was not related to teacher referral decisions. There was a significant relationship among teacher efficacy, student's gender, and teachers' referral decisions. Efficacious teachers were more likely to use RTI for a struggling female student than for a struggling male student. Taken together, teacher efficacy, student's gender, and student's ethnicity did not relate significantly to teachers' decisions to use RTI versus referring to special education. This study demonstrated promising results related to teachers' efficacy and teachers' decisions to use RTI. Study limitations include sample size and demographics, validity of using vignettes, and teachers responding in a socially desirable manner that may have precluded significant results. It is recommended that educators be ready for the paradigm shift away from the refer-test model to the RTI approach. Future research is encouraged to develop an RTI teacher efficacy scale and examine teachers' integrity of implementing of RTI.