Dissertations and Theses @ UNI
Availability
Open Access Thesis
Keywords
Academic achievement; High school students--Attitudes; Academic theses;
Abstract
Over the past eight years of teaching high school, I have noticed more and more high school students seem to be apathetic about their school work and academic success. I wanted to explore why students appeared to care less about their academic success. After consulting the literature, I realized the student voice was missing from most of the current studies; therefore, I wanted my qualitative study to focus on student views. In order to do so, I created two surveys: one for students and another for teachers, and I also interviewed a small sample of students after completion of the surveys. Teachers were used as a basis to reaffirm or discount student perspectives. The participants (186 student-surveyed and 5 student-interviews) came from a mid-sized, urban, Midwestern city, in a school of 1,700. I used thematic analysis to organize the data. The results yielded similar emergent themes: personal or motivational incentives, grades, graduation, testing, acquiring knowledge, dropout rate, attendance, skill level, and higher education, interaction with teachers and parental support or involvement. Most of these themes were identified by both students and teachers as predictors of success; however, acquiring knowledge was not identified by teachers and the dropout rate was not identified by students. Of these two, the most surprising is that teachers did not identify acquiring knowledge as a predictor of success for students. In the end, it seems that students and teachers are on the same page when it comes to defining academic success and offering predictors of success.
Year of Submission
2008
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Department of Communication Studies
First Advisor
Melissa Beall
Second Advisor
Victoria DeFrancisco
Third Advisor
H. Tom Hall
Date Original
2008
Object Description
1 PDF file (116 leaves)
Copyright
©2008 Heather Marie Bentley
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Bentley, Heather Marie, "Academic Success: A Qualitative Case Study of Student Perspectives" (2008). Dissertations and Theses @ UNI. 2051.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/2051
Comments
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