The Effect of College Student Demographic Variables on Teacher Enmeshment

Interactions between students and faculty outside of class appear to be linked to greater achievement during and after college (Anaya & Cole, 2001; Hathaway, Nagda, & Gregerman, 2002). However, sometimes there can be blurred personal boundaries and a lack of autonomy in relationships or what has been labeled enmeshment. The purpose of the current pilot study was to investigate the effect of race/ethnicity, gender, year in college, and college major on faculty-student relationships and teacher enmeshment. Teacher enmeshment was measured with the Teacher Enmeshment subscale of the Separation-Individuation Test of Adolescence (SITA; Levine & Saintonge, 1993). A sample of 165 undergraduate and graduate students from education and psychology classes at a small, private liberal arts institution in the Northeast participated. No significant differences among the different demographic groups were found on the total teacher enmeshment score. However, significant differences were found among students with different majors, by gender, and by race on individual items. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are provided.

Which School Attributes Matter? The Influence of School District Performance and Demographic Composition on Property Values

Increasing levels of segregation in American schools raises the question: do home buyers pay for test scores or demographic composition? This paper uses Connecticut panel data spanning eleven years from 1994 to 2004 to ascertain the relationship between property values and explanatory variables that include school district performance and demographic attributes, such as racial and ethnic composition of the student body. Town and census tract fixed effects are included to control for neighborhood unobservables. The effect of changes in school district attributes is also examined over a decade long time frame in order to focus on the effect of long run changes, which are more likely to be capitalized into prices. The study finds strong evidence that increases in percent Hispanic has a negative effect on housing prices in Connecticut, but mixed evidence concerning the impact of test scores on property values. Evidence is also found to suggest that student test scores have increased in importance for explaining housing prices in recent years while the importance of percent Hispanic has declined. Finally, the study finds that estimates of property tax capitalization increase substantially when the analysis focuses on long run changes.

Student Performance in Traditional vs. Online Format: Evidence from an MBA Level Introductory Economics Class

All previous studies comparing online and face-to-face format for instruction of economics compared courses that were either online or face-to-face format and regressed exam scores on selected student characteristics. This approach is subject to the econometric problems of self-selection omitted unobserved variables. Our study uses two methods to deal with these problems. First we eliminate self-selection bias by using students from a course that uses both instruction formats. Second, we use the exam questions as the unit of observation, and eliminate omitted variable bias by using an indicator variable for each student to capture the effect of differences in unobserved student characteristics on learning outcomes. We report the finding that students had a significantly greater chance of answering a question correctly if it came from a chapter covered online.