| Aruna Lakshmanan
Louisiana State University
A longitudinal study of adolescent educational aspirations and their relation to college choice using hierarchical linear modeling and group-based mixture modeling
Prior research on college choice has shown that early high educational aspirations and the maintenance of these aspirations through high school both have an impact on the postsecondary attendance of students. Findings have also shown that the stability of aspirations varies among students from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. This study seeks to understand better the factors that affect the stability of aspirations from the eighth grade to the twelfth, and examine the effects of variables such as parental involvement, achievement, and academic experiences in conjunction with demographic factors. This study will also attempt to understand how the stability of aspirations relates to actual action taken by these students toward college attendance. The findings from this study will highlight issues that policy makers need to be aware of if they hope to create interventions that may help students from all backgrounds develop and maintain high educational aspirations through high school, which in turn may increase postsecondary attendance and decrease dropout rates. This project will use hierarchical linear modeling to model the stability of aspirations as a continuous process, and complement this with results obtained by using the relatively new group-based mixture modeling technique.
Back to Funded Dissertation Grants Page |