Date of Award

Spring 2009

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

STEM Education & Professional Studies

Program/Concentration

Occupational and Technical Studies

Committee Director

John M. Ritz

Committee Member

Philip A. Reed

Committee Member

William Owings

Abstract

The intent of this dissertation was to determine if technology education program completers score higher on academic standards assessments than do students who do not enroll in technology education courses. Many states have developed academic standards for public school students to measure the quality of the educational system. States and local school systems adopted these standards and their accompanying tests to establish a level of academic competency for all of their students. One of the goals of technology education courses was to provide practical applications to reinforce the content of the core subject areas. The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a significant relationship between the performance scores of technology education program completers on their state standardized assessments as opposed to students who did not have technology education courses.

Pre-existing data were retrieved from one urban high school database in southeastern Virginia. The data that were collected included the standardized assessment scores in the subjects of English/language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. The population of technology education completers in this study was compared to a random sampling of an equal number of students that had not taken any technology education courses. Multiple t-tests were used to determine if there was a significant difference in the standardized assessment scores between technology education program completers and non-program completers.

The results of this study indicated a significant difference in the scores of technology education program completers on their state standardized assessments in three of the four subject areas that were examined. The mean scores of the technology education program completers were higher than the non-completers in all four subjects that were analyzed in this study. English/language arts was the only subject where the mean scores of the program completers were not significantly higher than the non-completers. The t values that were determined were significant in three out of the four subject areas at the .01 level of significance, which were history, mathematics, and science.

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DOI

10.25777/3a0k-ev89

ISBN

9781109125566

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