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Res High Educ (2012) 53:550575
DOI 10.1007/s11162-011-9239-y
Gary R. Pike John C. Smart Corinna A. Ethington
Received: 9 February 2011 / Published online: 1 September 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract This research examined the relationships among students academic majors, levels of engagement, and learning outcomes within the context of Hollands person environment theory of vocational and educational behavior. The study focused on the role of student engagement as a mediating agent in the relationships between academic majors and student learning. Drawing on data from a stratied random sample of 20,000 seniors who participated in the 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement, results revealed that students academic majors were signicantly related to levels of engagement and learning outcomes. Student engagement was also signicantly related to learning outcomes. Students academic majors generally were not indirectly related to learning outcomes through levels of engagement. An important exception to this result was found for students in Enterprising environments where indirect relationships among Enterprising disciplines and Enterprising learning outcomes were positive, statistically signicant, and substantially larger than the direct relationship.
Keywords Hollands theory Student engagement Learning outcomes Indirect effects
It is generally taken for granted that students academic majors inuence their learning and development during college. Students take the majority of their courses in their major elds of study, and interactions with faculty and peers in their majors represent a powerful socializing inuence (Snyder 1971; Weidman 1979, 1989). Surprisingly, ndings have not supported conventional wisdom. In their review, Feldman and Newcomb (1969) found evidence to suggest that some academic majors were related to students affective development, but major eld of study was not consistently related to learning outcomes.
G. R. Pike (&)
Indiana UniversityPurdue University-Indianapolis, 1100 Waterway, Room 53, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA e-mail: [email protected]
J. C. Smart C. A. Ethington
The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA
The Mediating Effects of Student Engagementon the Relationships Between Academic Disciplines and Learning Outcomes: An Extension of Hollands Theory
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Likewise, Pascarella and Terenzini (1991, 2005) found little evidence of strong, consistent relationships between academic majors and student learning outcomes.
Smart et al. (2000) suggested that failure to use a theory-based typology of academic disciplines is at the heart of the inability to document...