Annotated Bibliographies

Journal issues 21(1) (Spring 2001) and 21(2) (Fall 2001)

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Berge, L. & Mrozowski, S. (2001). Review of Research in Distance Education 1990 to 1999. The American Journal of Distance Education, 15(3), 5­19.

In this review, Berge and Mrozowski examine the research literature in distance education from 1990 to 1999. Using four prominent peer-reviewed, English language, distance-learning journals and dissertation abstracts that were related to the field of distance education, they found 1,419 articles and abstracts. The authors included only those articles in which a research methodology was reported (n = 890). They categorized the content based on a system by Sherry (1996), through which 10 research issues are identified: redefining roles of key participants, technology selection and adoption, design issues, strategies to increase interactivity and active learning, learner characteristics, learner support, operational issues, policy and management issues, equity and accessibility, and cost-benefit trade-off.

The patterns across journal and dissertation abstracts indicated a predominance of pedagogical issues in research. Three fourths of article and dissertation authors used a descriptive methodology. Other findings included: 1. Researchers tended to emphasize student outcomes for individual courses rather than for total academic program. 2. The research does not adequately explain the relatively high drop-out rate of distance learners. 3. The researchers tend to focus mostly on the impact of individual technologies rather than on the interactions of multiple technologies. 4. The research does not adequately address the effectiveness of digital libraries.

Chartrand, J. M., Gailbreath, R. D., Kahn, J. H., Nauta, M. M., & Tipps, J. (2002). The Utility of Career and Personality Assessment in Predicting Academic Progress. Journal of Career Assessment, 10(1), 3­23. Keywords: learning styles, academic achievement.

These researchers explored the use of four career and personality instruments in predicting grade-point average (GPA) and persistence into the sophomore year. They hypothesized that subscales from these four instruments would contribute to the prediction of performance and persistence beyond the effects of academic ability.

Study participants included 677 entering freshmen (355 women, 322 men) at a large southeastern university. Each participant had attended a freshman career-planning orientation course. The average age of the participants was 18 years, and the ethnicity breakdown was 86% Caucasian, 11% African American, 2% Asian, and 1% was of other ethnic groups. The mean ACT score for those participants who took the test was 21, and those who took the SAT had a comparable mean score as those who took the ACT. At the end of the freshman year, the participants' mean GPA was 2.49 (on a 4.00 scale) and 77% of the freshmen persisted into the sophomore year.

The instruments used in this study included the MBTI, the Personal Style Scales of the SII, the SSI, and the CFI. The MBTI Form M (Myers et al., 1998) is a 93-item self-report instrument that measures psychological type based on preferences described in Jungian theory. The Personal Style Scales of the SII (Harmon et al., 1994) measure preferences for and styles of living and working. The SSI (Riggio, 1989) is a 90-item self-report measure of social intelligence, or more specifically, social communication skills. The CFI (Chartrand & Robbins, 1997; Chartrand, Robbins, Morrill, & Boggs, 1990) contains 21 items that measure four antecedents of educational or career indecision: need for career information, need for self-knowledge, career choice anxiety, and generalized indecisiveness. ACT or SAT scores, first-year GPAs, and persistence status for students were obtained from university records following the spring semester of the freshman year.

First-year students who entered the university in the fall semesters of 1997, 1998, and 1999 were invited to participate in the study. Instruments were administered during a first-semester orientation course. The authors used a hierarchical regression analysis to predict GPA. Results indicate that the strongest predictor of high first-year GPAs was high ACT or SAT scores. The thinking preference (vs. feeling) preference on the MBTI was associated with a high GPA, and the work-style scale of the SII revealed that students who prefer working with people earned higher GPAs than did students who prefer working with data, ideas, and things. The subscales of the CFI were not predictors of first-year GPA.

The authors conducted a hierarchical logistic regression analysis to predict freshman-to-sophomore-year persistence. When the 18 subscales from the four career/personality instruments were combined with the ACT or SAT scores, the researchers found that several subscales emerge as predictors of persistence. Both the MBTI-extraversion and the MBTI-sensing preferences were significantly higher predictors of persistence than were MBTI-introversion and the MBTI-intuition preferences. The SII work style (preference for working with people) and learning environment (preference for academic environment) scales were each predictive of persisting. The career choice anxiety subscale of the CFI indicated that students with lower career-choice anxiety were more likely to persist into the sophomore year than were those with greater career-choice anxiety.

The results suggest that the instruments utilized in this study provide important ways to identify at-risk students. Interventions that target these students should lead to improved academic performance and retention.

In this study, the authors examined whether the mathematics placement system was gender biased (either underpredicting or overpredicting) actual grade averages for women and men at a medium-sized, independent northwestern university.

Participants for this study included almost all students who entered the university from fall 1991 through fall 1996 and took the mathematics placement test. The sample consisted of 1,388 students: 678 women and 710 men. Prior to registering for their first freshman math courses, students were asked to complete a survey in which they reported their most advanced math class in high school and the grade they received in it. Participants were also asked to take the math placement test, which is an in-house, multiple choice, computational math exam. The results of these data along with SAT-M scores were used to predict success in each of four freshman-level mathematics courses.

The researchers analyzed data using a combination of descriptive and inferential statistics, paired and unpaired t tests, ANOVAs, and nonparametric tests. Results indicate that multiple predictors add to the gender bias of the SAT-M. In this study, not only the SAT-M, but the placement test scores, previous math course, and previous mathematics course grade variables resulted in overestimating grades of men and underestimating grades of women in college algebra, business calculus, precalculus, and calculus courses.

These findings suggest that college and university personnel should use a regression formula approach to predict student success in math courses. In addition, educators should test for gender bias in all independent variables used in their regression formula.

Lent, R. W., Brown, S. D., Talleyrand, R., McPartland, E. B., Davis, T., Chopra, S. B., Alexander, M. S., Suthakaran, V., & Chai, C. (2002). Career Choice Barriers, Supports, and Coping Strategies: College Students' Experiences. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 60(1), 61­72. Keywords: undecided, career advising, stress, decision making.

The researchers set out to identify the perceived influences on college students' selection and implementation of career choices. Participants included students from two different universities who were interviewed by two semi-independent research teams. At one site, 19 students (5 men and 14 women) were enrolled at a large state university. The mean age of participants at this site was 22.21 years, and the sample consisted of 1 freshman, 1 sophomore, 4 juniors, 4 seniors, and 9 graduate students. Participants represented undergraduate majors in fine arts, technical and scientific fields, social sciences, and graduate programs in counseling or student personnel studies. Twelve participants (4 freshmen, 4 sophomores, 3 juniors, and 1 senior) were enrolled at the second site, a technical college, and were in their first 3 years of college. The average age of these participants was 25.50 years, and the students' majors included medical assisting, computer systems, business administration, and accounting. The student population at site no. 2 consisted mainly of nonaffluent, first-generation college students.

Undergraduate students at both sites were recruited for the study from introductory psychology classes, and the graduate students at site no. 1 were recruited from a master's level counseling pre-practicum class. Students who had already made tentative career plans were selected for the study. Participants at both sites were interviewed for 10­20 minutes using a common interview format that focused on factors that affected career choice, supports and barriers to pursuing choices, and strategies used to cope with choice barriers. The research teams consisted of a faculty member and five graduate student interviewers. All the interviews were audio taped.

Each research team determined response categories independently and then tracked the frequency with which participants mentioned each category. Results indicate that perceived interests, values, and abilities were important factors with regard to choice at both sites. While few participants cited social or family influences as bases for expected or rejected choices, experiential factors, such as direct and vicarious work experiences, were mentioned as influencing expected choices. These results support proponents of exposing students to career exploration activities so that students get a realistic picture of particular occupational fields and work tasks in relation to their own interests, values, and skills. Financial concerns, negative social or family influences, and role conflicts were stated as barriers to implementing occupational goals. Encouragement from family members, friends, and teachers was a frequently cited support factor in both groups. Coping strategies reported at both sites included direct problem-focused coping and seeking social support.

The findings of this study support the inclusion of barriers and supports into career choice theory and emphasize the importance of taking into account the characteristics and environments of particular groups of decision makers. The authors point to the need for additional research on career choice and examinations of the conditions that enable people to pursue personally fulfilling career options despite the barriers that block their way.

With attention to preferences concerning both occupational categories and cocurricular activities, Murray and Hall compared the predominant Holland personality types of male and female undergraduates, with attention to preferences concerning both occupational categories and cocurricular activities. Despite the flurry of earlier research activity, within the last decade surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the gender differences in the Holland personality types. The authors anticipated that the findings would lead to a more current and comprehensive understanding of gender-related influences on students' preferred activities. They added that the increased understanding would lead to more responsive programs and services within the area of career development and campus activities.

Participants consisted of 216 undergraduates from one residence hall at a baccalaureate college located in the mid-Atlantic region. The group was comprised mostly of sophomores (63%) and first-year students (37%); they were predominately female (59%) and identified themselves as Caucasian (90%). These students were administered the Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) (occupational) and the Student Activity Interest Questionnaire (SAIQ) (cocurricular activities).

Males scored higher than females on the realistic scale of the vocational instrument, while females scored higher than males on the social and enterprising scales of the same inventory. The gender-related patterns on the VPI were only partially replicated in their scores on the SAIQ. On the cocurricular inventory, males obtained higher realistic and investigative scores than did females, while females obtained higher artistic and social scores than did males. No significant differences were found on the remaining scales of either instrument.

Based on the results of the study, the authors conclude that certain traditional patterns of interests among male and female college students continue to hold firm at the close of the 20th century. According to both measures used in this study, realistic activities continue to hold greater appeal for male students than for female students, and social activities remain more interesting to female students than they do to male students. In regard to conventional interests, in which gender-related patterns have historically been inconsistent, the results of this study offer no evidence of differentiation between the sexes within either vocational or cocurricular contexts.

The authors discuss the practical implications of the findings with references to career services and campus activities. They commented on the relatively high enterprising score of females regarding the careers survey and a lack of a corresponding interest change in cocurricular activities. The authors also comment on the practice of interpreting the Holland-based interest inventories using raw scores instead of normalized scores based on gender.

The authors examined the underlying issues for academic underachievement of two gifted college males who were enrolled in two different universities. They used a qualitative case study method to understand the university experiences of the two participants.

One student is a 19-year-old Vietnamese American male attending a large urban university with an enrollment of 35,000. The university is described as extremely diverse with regard to both students and faculty. The other student is a 20-year-old African American male enrolled in a southeastern state university with a total student enrollment of 19,000. The university has a predominantly white student population with 10% African American enrollment and marginal faculty diversity.

University educators referred participants for the study. Data were collected using eight semi-structured interviews, students' university records, samples of papers students had submitted in courses, and personal photographs of their campus experiences. The in-depth interviews were structured to identify themes of the specific university student culture and activities as well as specific descriptions of participants' personal experiences. The interviews were transcribed, and authors coded all documents and analyzed them through analytic induction.

Four thematic categories, each playing a significant role in the participants' university experiences and academic performances, emerged from the analysis of the data: a) family and educational background, b) cultural influences, c) university peer relationships, and d) university academic experiences. Financial struggles were important in both participants' situations, while parental involvement in education differed dramatically. Differences were also apparent in the cultural influence category. The first-generation Asian American experienced tremendous pressure to achieve, while the academic expectations were set far too low for the African American student. For both students, peer relationships were problematic and neither student felt supported by the university's program, curricula, or faculty.

The authors of this study emphasize the importance of developing strategies and mentoring programs that positively impact the retention of culturally diverse first-generation university students. One-size-fits-all approaches to working with different populations of students are ineffective. Attention must be given to the growing population of diverse students in colleges and universities nationwide and how these students are served.

During the last 2 decades of the 20th century, the states and the federal governments have financed higher education differently than ever before. This period can be appropriately characterized as an era of high tuition, and high aid, but recently an emphasis has been placed on loans rather than grants. The authors ask: How have these changes in the cost of college influenced the opportunities of students in different income groups to attain a higher education? This study examined how student enrollment response to college costs, as measured by both college choice and persistence decisions, vary by social class. The focus on social class is a departure from mainstream research on college students, which focuses primarily on students of traditional college age and background, and the studies has been dominated by the research traditions of developmental and change theories.

These authors base their financial nexus model on a student-choice construct that has three basic assumptions: a) a sequence in educational choices with explicit policy linkages exists; b) there are patterns of student choice, and therefore diverse groups, that merit study; c) students make choices in "situated" contexts. The overarching assumption behind the authors' approach is that it is important to examine how students make situated decisions based on their own, suited circumstances.

Recent application of social reproduction theory to investigations of college student enrollment decisions have been based on Bourdieu's (1977; 1990) concepts of "cultural capital" and "habitus." Cultural capital represents forms of symbolic wealth (linguistic structure, school-related information, social networks, etc.) that are transmitted from upper- and middle-class parents to their children to sustain class status from one generation to the next. Habitus is an enduring, internal system of values, attitudes, beliefs, and actions that is derived from the student's immediate family, community, school, environment, and is common to members of one's social class. The financial nexus model examines the effects of student background and perceptions about costs (financial reasons for choosing a college), college experience (including measures of student achievement in college), current aspirations, and finances (market-based, monetary measures of price subsidies) on persistence.

The authors of this study used the National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey of 1987 as the database. They analyzed the data using 15 variables related to student background; two sets of dichotomous variables, as measures of perception and expectations of college costs; 10 variables related to the college experience; current aspirations coded as a design set of dichotomies; and 5 financial variables.

Findings revealed substantial class-based patterns of enrollment behavior in response to prematriculation perceptions of college costs and actual post-matriculation costs, which consistently were shown to restrict postsecondary opportunities for lower-income relative to higher-income students.

A cross-class comparison of descriptive statistics about educational attainment revealed that lower-income students are less likely than higher- income students to attend private colleges or 4-year institutions, attend full-time, or live on campus. Women who live in poverty were less likely than men to maintain continuous enrollments. Poor people with nontraditional precollege experiences (those with no high school or general equivalency degrees) were more likely to persist than those with high school degrees.

The analysis of the choice-persistence nexus by social class produced interesting findings about the role of race and ethnicity in education. A cross-class comparison of descriptive statistics about educational attainment revealed that poor and working-class students were more likely than middle- upper-class students to earn "A" grades, but they aspired to substantially lower levels of postsecondary attainment.

The findings of this study revealed clear and substantial class-based patterns of enrollment behavior related to students' perceptions and expectations of college costs. The authors conclude that the high-tuition, loan environment is clearly problematic for poor and working-class students.

The researchers of this study examined role-model influence on the career decidedness of college students within the context of the Social Learning Theory of Career Decision-Making (Krumboltz, 1981). Krumboltz asserted that career indecision is often a consequence of unsatisfactory or insufficient opportunities for learning, including vicarious learning through role models.

In the study, 208 females and 125 males from an undergraduate psychology course in a large southeastern university volunteered to participate. The participants completed a questionnaire regarding demographic information, identification of role model supportiveness, role-model relationship quality, and career decidedness.

Results of an ANOVA indicated that role-model supportiveness and role-model relationship quality contribute significantly to career decidedness of the participants. The majority of participants selected same-gender role models. Based on the findings from the study, one can conclude that a supportive, high-quality role model relationship can benefit both male and female college students as they make career decisions.

The impact of a university career development course that is based on cognitive information-processing theory was studied with regard to the negative or dysfunctional career thoughts for students enrolled in the course.

Participants in the study were 181 undergraduates at a southern research university. The sample consisted of 126 women and 55 men from nine course sections in 1997­98. Sophomores made up the majority of the sample with 50% of the participants, and freshmen, juniors, and seniors made up 18%, 15%, and 17% of the sample, respectively. The ethnic diversity of the sample included Native American Indian (1%), Hispanic American (4%), African American (13%), Caucasian (75%), other (3%), and not classified (3%) individuals.

Students completed the Career Thoughts Inventory (CTI) (Sampson, Peterson, Lenz, Reardon, & Saunders, 1996) in the first week of the course and again during the last week of the course. Students also completed the booklet form of the CTI as part of their class assignment. The CTI is based on cognitive information-processing theory and cognitive therapy in relation to career problem solving and decision making. Results of the CTI report dysfunctional career problem solving and decision making (total score), decision making confusion (DMC), commitment anxiety (CA), and external conflict (EC). The DMC scale measures an inability to initiate or continue the decision-making process because of impaired emotions or a lack of knowledge, or both, about the process of decision making. The CA scale denotes an inability to commit to a specific career choice and the presence of generalized anxiety about the consequences of making a career decision. The EC scale represents a person's negative thinking regarding balancing one's own perceptions against the perceptions of significant others related to making career choices.

The authors used a MANOVA to determine the influence of a career-planning course on changes in dysfunctional career thoughts. The results suggest a positive relationship between the career course and cognitive variables, especially for those students who had relatively higher levels of negative thoughts at the beginning of the course. DMC and CA anxiety contributed significantly to the main effect. There were no significant interactions of influence with regard to ethnicity or sex.

Because of the small number of Asian American, Native American, and Hispanic students included in the sample, the authors caution against generalizing the results of this study to minority populations. Limitations of the study include the difficulty in determining which career interventions in the course led to the reductions in negative career thoughts. In addition, the ability to determine if changes in negative career thinking could be attributed to the course or were the result of experiences outside the classroom. Additional research that includes the use of a control condition or a compassion treatment group would reduce the threats to external validity that were inherent in this study.

This study had two main purposes: The first purpose was to determine the differences between students enrolling during the three phases of registration (early, regular, and late) in a 2-year college. The second purpose was to suggest late registration policies and practices that might improve student success. The study researchers used the inputs-environment-outputs (IEO) assessment model of Astin (1993) as a conceptual framework.

Registration time, academic records, and demographic information were collected from a stratified random sample of students at one community college in the fall of 1998. Students were grouped according to type (new and returning) and registration time (early, regular, and late). The sample consisted of 86 new students and (55 regular and 31 late registrants) and 165 returning students (55 from each phase of registration). Analysis of covariance and chi-square tests were used to analyze the data.

For both the new and returning students, late registrants were shown to be much less likely to persist to the spring semester than were early (returning students only) or regular registrants. Of the new students, 80% of the regular and 35% of the late registrants were retained to the next semester. For returning students, 80% of the early, 64% of the regular, and 42% of the late registrants were retained.

Differences in withdrawal rates were also significant for both new and returning students. New students who registered on time (regular) withdrew from 10% of their course hours while those who registered late withdrew from 21% of their course hours. For returning students, early registrants withdrew from 5% of their course hours; regular registrants withdrew from 4%; and late registrants withdrew from 13%. Returning students also differed in their semester grade-point averages and their successful completion rate based on the time of registration.

The authors suggest that this study raises concerns not only about the late registration policies of community colleges but of the policies found in higher education in general. They present four conclusions: 1. Late registration practices seem to be detrimental to students in terms of academic success. 2. Late registration practices seem to hinder retention of students. 3. Registration conducted prior to the first day of class (both early and regular) seems to be a sound avenue for enrollment of students as more early and regular registrants than late registrants achieved subsequent academic success and were retained.4. More research is needed to determine the extent that lower academic achievement and retention of late registrants, rather than other confounding variables, can be attributed to registration time.

Bibliographies appearing in the NACADA Journal are compiled by George Steele and Melinda McDonald.