THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PARENTING STYLES, LEARNING AUTONOMY, AND SCHOLASTIC ACHIEVEMENT IN UNDERGRADUATE COLLEGE STUDENTS

Throughout the years, the role that parents play with regard to a child’s academic achievement has been the source of considerable research. The type of parenting style employed by parents, whether it is authoritarian, authoritative, or permissive, has and continues to be a major theme in these studies. One area of particular interest that has been overlooked in these studies, however, is the influence that parents may have on a student’s learning autonomy. Learning autonomy is the idea that a student has internal motivation to learn or achieve. The purpose of this study was to investigate therelationship among the three styles of parenting, learning autonomy, perceived parental autonomy support, and scholastic achievement in undergraduate college students. Sixty-one participants were recruited at a small liberal arts college in the northeastern United States to complete questionnaires, which measured perceived parental authority of the participants’ parents, perceived parental autonomy support, and students’ own learning autonomy. The participants were also asked to list their grade point average. The results revealed positive and negative correlations between many of the variables in the study;however, simple regression analyses did not yield any statistically significant relationships between parental authority, learning autonomy, perceived autonomy support, and scholastic achievement.

AAC&U's Integrative Liberal Learning and the CAS Standards: Advising for a 21st Century Liberal Education

The Association of American Colleges and Universities presented and promoted integrative liberal learning as a collaborative goal that all institutions of higher education must strive to achieve. The similarities between the goals of integrative liberal learning and the Standards for Academic Advising by the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education are discussed with emphasis placed on the critical role that academic advising plays in support of an integrative liberal learning education, and in turn, future success for all students.

Teacher resistance to school-based consultation with the school psychologist: An analysis according to school level and model of identification for special education services

Consultation is promoted throughout school psychology literature as a best practice in service delivery. This method has numerous benefits including being able to work with more students at one time, providing practitioners with preventative rather than strictly reactive strategies, and helping school professionals meet state and federal education mandates and initiatives. Despite the benefits of consultation, teachers are sometimes resistant to this process.This research studies variables hypothesized to lead to resistance (Gonzalez, Nelson, Gutkin, & Shwery, 2004) and attempts to distinguish differences between school level (elementary, middle and high school) with respect to the role played by these variables and to determine if the model used to identify students for special education services has an influence on resistance factors. Twenty-sixteachers in elementary and middle schools responded to a demographicquestionnaire and a survey developed by Gonzalez, et al. (2004). This survey measures eight variables related to resistance to consultation. No high school teachers responded to the request to participate. Results of analysis of variance indicated a significant difference in the teaching efficacy subscale with elementary teachers reporting more efficacy in teaching than middle school teachers. Results also indicate a significant difference in classroom managementefficacy with teachers who work in schools that identify students according to a Response to Intervention model reporting higher classroom management efficacy than teachers who work in schools that identify students according to a combined method of refer-test-place/RtI combination model. Implications, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

Influence of Engineering Instructors' Teaching and Learning Beliefs on Pedagogies in Engineering Science Courses

This study explored how academics' beliefs about teaching and learning influenced their teaching in engineering science courses typically taught in the second or third year of 4-year engineering undergraduate degrees. Data were collected via a national survey of 166 U. S. statics instructors and interviews at two different institutions with 17 instructors of engineering science courses such as thermodynamics, circuits and statics. The study identified a number of common beliefs about how to best support student learning of these topics; each is discussed in relation to the literature about student development and learning. Specific recommendations are given for educational developers to encourage use of research-based instructional strategies in these courses.