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Browsing by Author "Grimes, Matthew W."

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    An Analysis of the Appeals of College and University Viewbooks to the Underlying Dispositions of Frequent Drinkers and Non Drinkers
    Grimes, Matthew W. (Virginia Tech, 2002-04-15)
    Educators and researchers who study college alcohol use have explored shaping the campus environment as a method to positively influence college students' decisions regarding alcohol use. Existing literature has suggested that the interaction between the college students and the campus environment affects students' behavior (Goree & Szalay, 1996; Strange & Banning, 2001). The purpose of this study was to analyze how college and university viewbooks appeal to the different underlying dispositions of college students (non drinker vs. frequent drinker dispositions). The present study was also intended to identify whether college and university viewbooks are a part of the campus environment that affects students' behavioral decisions. The purposive sample included 51 college and university viewbooks from four different regions, six Carnegie Classifications, and an over-sampling of historically Black institutions. The findings revealed that college and university viewbooks appeal more to the non drinker dispositions than to the frequent drinker disposition. The findings also call into question previous scholarship suggesting that university recruitment materials have an influence on college student behaviors.
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    The Nature of Knowledge Change Among Students in a Peer Leadership Course
    Grimes, Matthew W. (Virginia Tech, 2016-05-02)
    The following dissertation is comprised of three manuscripts presenting a theory-to-practice design for studying the nature of knowledge change. Knowledge change—as defined for this dissertation—is an exploration of the quantitative and qualitative change in how knowledge is used over a period of time. Knowledge change is derived from the broader scholarship on conceptual change; that is, how people develop, organize, and then re-organize knowledge (Vosniadou, 2013). Conceptual change has been widely used to describe the cognitive process behind how a novice acquires and organizes knowledge in order to become an expert (Carey, 1985), particularly in the hard sciences (e.g. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, or 'STEM' subjects) (Vosniadou, 2008, 2013). However, more recent research has been dedicated to establishing the need to explore conceptual change in the social sciences (Murphy and Alexander, 2008). The present research was designed to explore knowledge change as one specific component of the conceptual change process. The research is presented in three manuscripts. The first manuscript details how the researcher blended conceptual change learning with the disciplinary domain of the present study, leadership studies. The second manuscript chronicles the design of a continuous case study, the primary tool for data collection used in the present study, as well as the methodology used. The third and final manuscript offers an overview of the first study undertaken using the collected data; that is, an exploration of the nature of knowledge change within an undergraduate peer leadership course.