Matching Items (3)
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- All Subjects: Early Childhood
- All Subjects: Educational evaluation
- Creators: Kelley, Michael
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Resource Type: Text
- Status: Published
Description
This action research dissertation study was undertaken to establish the foundation of a comprehensive evaluation component for the Turn-It-Around (TIA) workshop intervention program at Arizona State University (ASU), and was delivered in the form of a program development consultation. The study's intent was to enhance the ASU Counseling Service's departmental capacity to evaluate one of its important clinical services. The outcomes of this study included multiple assessments of TIA's evaluability and the fidelity of its implementation to its program design. The study products include a well-articulated program theory comprised of program goals, learning objectives, a detailed description of program activities, a logic model, and theoretical construct checklist documents articulating the behavioral science theory underlying the TIA intervention. In addition, instruments tailored to the Turn-It-Around intervention that are suitable for assessing program outcomes were developed and are implementation ready. TIA's clinical stakeholders were interviewed following the generation and delivery of the products and instruments mentioned above to determine whether they found the study's processes and products to be worthwhile and useful. In general, the clinicians reported that they were very satisfied with the benefits and outcomes of the program development consultation. As an action research dissertation, this study generated useful and usable collateral materials in the form of reports, documents, and models. These products are now at the disposal of TIA's institutional stakeholders for use in day-to-day business activities such as training new facilitators and liaisons, and giving presentations that describe the usefulness of TIA as an intervention. Beyond the documents generated to form a program evaluation infrastructure for Turn-It-Around, the processes involved in crafting the documents served to engage relevant stakeholders in a cycle of action research that enriched and solidified their understandings of TIA and furnished them with insight into their counterparts' thinking about the intervention and its potential to benefit the college students they are responsible for helping. Consistent with the intent of action research, the processes involved in accomplishing the objectives of this study surfaced new topics and questions that will be useful in subsequent cycles of program improvement.
ContributorsLacey, Sheila (Author) / Lacey, Sheila D (Thesis advisor) / Clark, Christopher (Committee member) / Kelley, Michael (Committee member) / Krasnow, Aaron (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
STEM education stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and is necessary for students to keep up with global competition in the changing job market, technological advancements and challenges of the future. However, American students are lacking STEM achievement at the state, national and global levels. To combat this lack of achievement I propose that STEM instruction should begin in preschool, be integrated into the curriculum and be inquiry based. To support this proposal I created a month-long physics unit for preschoolers in a Head Start classroom. Students investigated the affect of incline, friction and weight on the distance of a rolling object, while developing their pre-math, pre-literacy and social emotional skills.
ContributorsGarrison, Victoria Leigh (Author) / Kelley, Michael (Thesis director) / Dahlstrom, Margo (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The presence of children can influence importantly how households respond to income risk. The aim of this dissertation is to study how different aspects of families' life-cycle decisions are affected by different sources of income fluctuation. In the first part of this dissertation, I study the relationships between fertility choices, consumption, and labor supply, by developing a model with endogenous fertility decisions and income volatility. Within this framework, fertility choices act as a mechanism to smooth utility over time. In this context, I analyze the insurance value of fertility choices. I use a structural model that combines two features underexplored by the literature: children as consumption commitments, and nonseparabilities of family size and consumption. Having children in the household affects consumption and labor marginal utilities, changing the insurance value of fertility decisions and generating incentives to avoid childbearing during low-income spells. I find that the welfare loss of a negative transitory income shock is 34 to 38 times larger if households are not able to choose when to have their children. These results underscore how costly unplanned childbearing can be to the household in terms of welfare.The second part of this dissertation evaluates the impact of being born under negative conditions in the labor market on human capital formation, and what parental behavior could be leading to those effects. I estimate the impact of the unemployment rates on children's assessment outcomes in cognitive and noncognitive skills. Counterintuitively, the results suggest that higher unemployment rates are linked to positive child development outcomes later in childhood. In my main specification, an increase of 1 percentage point in state unemployment causes an increase of 2.5% of a standard deviation in cognitive test scores after controlling for income at birth, hours worked at birth, and other variables.
ContributorsMangini, Marco (Author) / Silverman, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Aucejo, Esteban (Committee member) / Murphy, Alvin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021