Browsing by Author "Tran, Michelle"
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Item Estimating the Impact of Preparatory Teaching Experience on Teacher Retention(2019-05) Tran, MichelleAbout 21 percent of Texas teachers leave the profession within the first three years of teaching. Taking advantage of variation in required preparatory teaching experience -- called student teaching -- hours across educator preparation programs (EPPs), this study uses pooled Texas administrative data to adapt Boyd et al.'s (2006) conceptual model of the effects of EPP characteristics on teacher retention. A logistic regression with year and program fixed effects estimates substantial gains from increasing the number of hours required for student teaching. In fact, increasing the number of hours required for student teaching from one semester (0-300 hours) to two semesters (301-600 hours) can increase the odds of retaining a teacher for one year by 54.4 percent. An increase from one to four semesters of student teaching is correlated with a 70.9 percent increase the odds two-year teacher retention. A state mandate for two semesters of student teaching would raise the state's one-year teacher retention rate to 74.6 percent and a mandate for four semesters of student teaching would raise the state's two-year retention rate to 63.4 percent. However, there are decreasing marginal returns to additional hours of student teaching in terms of retention. The number of required hours for student teaching represents an important yet singular aspect of teacher preparation and state policies should expand their focus on teacher preparation beyond student teaching requirements.Item Perinatal Depression: The Impact of Pre-screening on Adult Perinatal Women(2023) Qian, Bailu; Roden, Katelyn; Schroeder, Leslie; Tran, Michelle; Unverzagt, Emily; Wilkinson, StephanieAntepartum depression is a widespread mental health concern that can negatively impact both the mother and the developing baby. However, the current approach to care involves only one screening after childbirth, despite many women experiencing symptoms throughout their pregnancy. The inadequate screening procedures for antepartum women have resulted in a troubling failure to recognize and treat depression during pregnancy. Numerous instances of depression among this group remain untreated, posing a significant risk to the emotional well-being of women during this vulnerable period. The insufficient screening contributes to the high occurrence of postpartum depression, affecting new mothers worldwide and causing harm to both maternal and infant health. It is vital to establish a comprehensive pre-screening program for depression to tackle this problem. This would ensure timely intervention, potentially reducing or even eliminating postpartum depression symptoms and enhancing mental health outcomes for antepartum women.Item The Effects of Science Mentoring on Mentee Confidence(2022-04-14) Bui, Tiffany; Reeves, Hannah; Tran, MichelleSMART, or Science Mentoring to Achieve a Richer Tomorrow, is a service project within the Bonner Leaders program of the Honors College. We strive to increase personal confidence and science STAAR scores of 5th-grade mentees at Shearn Elementary through hands-on science experiments and one-on-one mentorship. We choose science mentoring because hands-experiments ensure the students stay interested, and regular investigations of the scientific process aid students in developing critical thinking skills. Most important of all is the sense of achievement that the mentees get to enjoy when they successfully answer a practice STAAR question or skillfully carry out a science experiment with the aid of a mentor. We hope that this sense of achievement pushes mentees to become more confident in themselves and their skills, and this research project provides the analysis to back up that claim. At the beginning and middle of the school year, each mentee filled out a short survey that quantified how confident they felt about science, the STAAR test, and the school year to come. The two scores of each question from the beginning and middle of the year were compared for each mentee, and the differences of each question were averaged. The overall average demonstrated a 6.25% increase for all 3 survey questions, with relatively large variation between each question. It would seem that SMART was able to marginally increase the confidence of these students in one semester of mentoring, but the p-value came out to 0.3404, demonstrating no statistical significance.