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Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Theses and Dissertations by Subject "academic achievement"

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    Academic resiliency and the post-secondary choices of Mexican American and non-Hispanic white students
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2008) Trujillo, Malinda E., author; Chavez, Ernest, advisor; Deffenbacher, Jerry L., advisor
    This study examined the factors that contribute to the college attendance of dropouts, at-risk students, and control students. Research on dropouts and at risk in-school students typically tends to focus on the factors that inhibit their academic success. Concentrating on risk factors overshadows what might be gained by studying students who are academically successful despite the obstacles and risk factors (Arellano & Padilla, 1996). The academic resiliency literature has shown that a student's academic success depends in part on the "goodness of fit" between contextual events (the family and school environments) and their adaptive resources such as personal attitudes and external support systems (Alva & Padilla, 1995). The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the environmental and personal resources which foster the academic success of Mexican American and Non-Hispanic White high school students and dropouts also foster their decision to attend a postsecondary school. The variables of interest included are parental social support, parental involvement in school activities, peer social support, peer school engagement, and student school engagement. Results were analyzed using logistic regression. Using logistic regression the log-odds of attending a post-secondary school were regressed on peer social support, peer school engagement, parental support, parental involvement, and student school engagement. In this way, the odds of attending post-secondary school as a function of the predictors of interest and relevant control variables were assessed. The results were discussed from an intervention framework.
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    Achievement motivation in Bulgaria and the United States: a cross-country comparison
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2008) Cigularov, Konstantin Petkov, author; Thornton, George C., III, advisor
    The present study used the multifaceted Achievement Motivation Inventory (AMI: Schuler, Thornton, Frintrup, & Mueller-Hanson, 2004) to compare the achievement motivation of college students from Bulgaria (n = 465) and the United States (n = 1022) at the facet level. Multiple group confirmatory factor analyses revealed that 11 of the 17 AMI scales exhibited measurement invariance across the two samples. Results from the latent and observed mean differences analyses were consistent to indicate that, compared to students from the United States, Bulgarian students reported higher levels of Compensatory Effort, Flow, Persistence, Preference for Difficult Tasks, Pride in Productivity, and Self-Control; lower levels of Fearlessness and Internality; and similar levels of Competitiveness, Confidence in Success, and Status Orientation. These findings illustrate the importance of establishing measurement invariance prior to making mean comparisons and the usefulness of multifaceted assessment in examining and comparing the achievement motivation profiles of individuals with different backgrounds and characteristics. Implications of the results, limitations, as well as recommendations for future research are discussed.