The extent to which social norms (injunctive and descriptive) are associated with collegiate alcohol use--including binge drinking--has been examined at length, but studies examining the efficacy of interventions derived thereof have reported mixed outcomes. This study examines data from 5,124 college students at 13 different colleges collected by…

Higher levels of civic and community engagement in higher education are positively associated with students' academic performance and they also build upon citizenship skills such as informed voting. Yet, while these are worthy and important outcomes of higher education, students from disadvantaged backgrounds can have more difficulty navigating…

Using participants from an 1-and-1/2-year longitudinal study of smoking socialization (N = 709), we examined peer smoking, and implicit and explicit attitudes on smoking initiation among initial nonsmoking adolescents. We also tested whether implicit and explicit attitudes mediated the effect of peer smoking on smoking initiation, and whether…

Novice special educators (those in their first 3 years) consistently report their workloads are unmanageable. Yet, it is not clear whether their perceptions of workload manageability contribute to outcomes of concern such as emotional exhaustion (a component of burnout) or intentions to continue teaching in their schools and districts. This pilot…

Previous studies have shown that state performance funding policies do not increase baccalaureate degree production, but higher education scholarship lacks a rigorous, quantitative analysis of the unintended consequences of performance funding. In this article, we use difference-in-differences estimation with fixed effects to evaluate performance…

Legislation has mandated that secondary schools provide services for students with disabilities that prepare them for independent living, employment, and/or post-secondary education (IDEA, 2004). This study examined the perceptions of special education directors, assistant directors/program coordinators, and secondary special education teachers…

Because juveniles can now be registered as sex offenders, we conducted a pilot study to investigate awareness of these policies and sexual behavior histories in a convenience sample of 53 young adults (ages 18 to 23, 79% women). These preliminary data revealed that 42% percent of participants were unaware that youth under the age of 18 can be…

Using survey data from novice teachers across 99 schools, we estimated multilevel regressions to identify the association between novices' intent to remain teaching within their schools and their perceptions of the collegial climate. The results suggest that novice teachers who perceive a more positive collegial climate marked by higher degrees…

In 2008, the Indiana legislature passed and the governor signed into law House Enrolled Act No. 1001, now referred to as Public Law 146-2008, which capped Indiana school districts' ability to raise revenues from the local property tax without local voter approval. To phase in the impact of the law, the state provided school districts with levy…

Our study adds to prior work on Indiana's Twenty-first Century Scholars(TFCS) program by focusing on whether participating in--rather than completing--the program affects the likelihood of students going to college and where they initially enrolled. We first employ binary and multinomial logistic regression to obtain estimates of the impact of the…

Purpose: Dog owners represent 40% of the population, a promising audience to increase population levels of physical activity. The purpose of this study was to develop and test the psychometric properties of a new instrument to assess social-cognitive theory constructs related to dog walking. Method: Dog owners ("N" = 431) completed the…

Nine years of results on 4.2 million of Indiana's Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress (ISTEP) mathematics (math) exams (grades 3-10) taken after the implementation of No Child Left Behind have been used to determine gender gaps and their associated trends. Sociocultural factors were investigated by comparing math gender gaps and gap…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to analyze how high school principals approached developing a collaborative culture and providing collaborative leadership in a large high school setting. The population sample for this study was 82 principals of large comprehensive high schools of grades 9 through 12 or some combination thereof with…

We compare beginning special and general education teachers' access to school-based colleagues. Our findings demonstrate that colleague relationships are critical for the experiences of beginning teachers, as are the school organizational norms that these beginning teachers experience. For special education teachers in particular, perception of…

Anatomy A215: Basic Human Anatomy (Anat A215) is an undergraduate human anatomy course at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) that serves as a requirement for many degree programs at IUB. The difficulty of the course, coupled with pressure to achieve grades for admittance into specific programs, has resulted in high remediation rates. In an…