Collage Success of Students from Three High School Settings - Article Example

Critical Evaluation of ‘Collage Success from Three High School Settings’ Sutton and Galloway explores deep into the national problems regarding the outcomes of the root level educational sector in order to establish the inevitable significance of their study. With a holistic view of the student-teacher performance and their success rate, and the far-reaching effect in the making of the nation these researchers sets the aim of their study to investigate the undergraduate success of students. With a view to dealing with the question “to what extent are the shortcomings of our nation’s schools affecting our nation’s students and their future success, particularly, success in collage?” (Sutton & Galloway, n.d. p. 50) they primarily assumed depending on the research of Sutton, McKinney, and Hallahan (1992) that school settings affect student’s performance and therefore, they set the outline of their study on the comparative line among the three types of schools: home school, private school, and public school. As a result, the study apparently loses the rudimentary trait, but other reviews of literatures that Sutton and Galloway refer in their study make a clear and harmonious relation with the purpose of their study. Their literature reviews clearly assess the level of performance and success of these schools. The procedure of the study appears to in fair concordance with the holistic purpose. The researchers prudently selected the participants from the balanced proportional ranges in order to encapsulate the whole country and to avoid the marginal bias. Participants of the study aptly represent the all of the 50 states and 48 foreign countries; though the study must confront the question whether each school individually represented all of the states of the country, the numbers of none of these schools equate the numbers of the states. So the question arises whether the fragmental number of each school fairly represents all of the same types of schools in the whole country. However, the representational integrity of the participants of each school seemed to compensate the lack of the representation of all the schools of the whole country. One hundred and eighty sample students of 1992-3 academic years were taken from the Liberal Arts University and they were compared school-wise with those who completed their graduation in 1997. Determining the rate of representation of the students with the use of Chi-square scale and considering the effect of the socioeconomic status of the students the data were intended on an all-embracing set of 40 indicators. Indeed their procedure of the investigation is all embracing enough to encapsulate the enormity of the subject and the multifarious nature of the study. Their procedure of sorting out the indicators in five major domains of learning outcomes and then the multivariate analysis of variance showed an encouraging result for those students who completed from home schools. However, the result was not as encouraging for the private schools as it was for the home schools. The performance of the public school students remained unaffected. After all, the research had a greater significance in the primary and high school levels of the existing education system of the country. The ways, how Sutton and Galloway delved deep into the problem of the students’ performance in the educational system and its further impact on the country and likewise how they prepared the outline of the research are praiseworthy, because their research at a time present two scenario: the competency of the schools and the performance of the students in the various job sectors of the country. Critical Evaluation of “Factors That Influence Self-Efficacy of Counseling Students: An Exploratory Study” In their study, “Factors That Influence Self-Efficacy of Counseling Students: An Exploratory Study” though Tang et al deal with an important issue of the influence of age, prior work experience, number of internship hours and number of course taken on an individual’s self-efficacy of counseling, they, to a slight extent, failed to uphold the significance and importance of the study. However, their credit lies in the fact that they, at a time, approached with several purposes within the same study line: 1. “to investigate counseling self-efficacy of graduate students in counselor education programs to determine whether Bandura’s (1986) self-efficacy theory applies”, 2. Investigation into the “relation between the training background of graduate counseling students and counselor efficacy” (Tang et al, n.d., p. 30), (3) investigation into the fact whether age prior work experience and gender influence the self-efficacy of counseling competency, (4) Research into the difference between the self-efficacy competencies of the CACREP students and non-CAPREP students. But with these multifaceted approaches their study can severely be criticized on the point that Tang et al have often been distracted from the aim of their study for several times because of the enormity of their subjects. The enormities of their subjects are such that each of them can be studied with an individual and independent approach. The main flaw within their study purpose is that they did not clearly mention any main study line in their article. Indeed any out of the previously mentioned four research points might be the primary investigation line of their research and the rest might stem to it. Ultimately, it seems that their study possesses more of the features of an article with an umbrella topic than of a research focused into a unified subject point. As Tang et al failed to focus into any point as the subject of their study, their literature reviews also are not in harmony with the subject. Indeed, they attempted to treat a multifaceted subject their literature reviews are of diverse subject matters. Here one thing is remarkable that the literature reviews aptly define some points of the study. However, even if their study lacks a particular focus the method of the study appears to be convincing. The sample included a diverse body of participants of different ages, sex, and with different numbers of courses and internship hours. Tang used several sound instruments like a complete set of questionnaire in order to collect the data regarding topics of their study. As the focus of the study was multifaceted, data were analyzed in two ways in order to get two types of outputs: 1. Two-group multivariate analysis of variance was used to perceive the difference between the competencies of CACREP and non-CACREP students, 2. then a multivariate analysis of covariance was used to estimate the influence of age, courses taken, hours of internship on the self-efficacy of the students, as Tang et al says, it was performed to determine “whether the difference (if found) between the two groups would remain when all the above variable are controlled” (Tang et al, n.d., p. 34). In spite of the lack of proper expression of the focus point of the study, the result and the discussion happened to point out remarkable findings that denoted some factors which influence the self-efficacy of counseling students. References Sutton, P. J. & Galloway, S. R. (n.d.) ‘Collage Success of Students from Three High School Settings,’ Quantitative Non-experimental Designs Tang et al, (n.d.) “Factors That Influence Self-Efficacy of Counseling Students: An Exploratory Study”, Quantitative Non-experimental Designs Read More