Center on Disability Studies eNewsletter, June 2023

Welcome to our summer newsletter. In this issue we highlight many events and happenings sponsored by CDS during June and July that you don’t want to miss out on. Disability Pride Month is also celebrated each year in July. Disability Pride initially started as a day of celebration in 1990, the year that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law. It is also an opportunity to raise awareness about improving access and inclusion. The first official Disability Pride celebration occurred in 2015 to commemorate the ADA’s 25th anniversary and the Disability Pride Flag was originally designed in 2019 by Ann Magill, who with feedback within the disabled community, refined its visual elements in 2021 to be more accessible. You can read more about how the disability pride flag helps increase the community’s visibility at https://go.hawaii.edu/qEX

A PREDICTIVE STUDY OF SELF-REGULATED LEARNING IN TEACHER CANDIDATES AND PRAXIS EXAMINATION ACHIEVEMENT

Nationally, teacher candidates struggle to pass the Praxis examination, which they need to be licensed. Little research has been done to examine the characteristics and learning strategies of teacher candidates who pass and who do not pass the Praxis examination. Studies have shown benefits in the use of self-regulation and achievement in courses and on other examinations. Zimmerman’s (1989) self-regulated learning theory describes how teacher candidates engage in self-directed planning, learning, and reflecting to achieve a goal. The purpose of this dissertation is to describe the purpose, method, design, and analysis of a predictive study to determine whether self-regulation, as measured by the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ), predicts success or failure on the Praxis examination. The MSLQ was disseminated to graduate and undergraduate teacher candidates who have taken the Praxis at least once at a mid-sized Southeastern university. A binominal logistic regression was conducted to determine whether teacher candidates’ levels of self-regulation were predictive of their performance on the Praxis examination, controlling for race/ethnicity, gender, and traditional/non-traditional status. The results of the study indicated that self-regulation was predictive of whether candidates passed or failed the Praxis examination. The model predicted 81.7% of the variance between teacher candidates who passed and those who failed the Praxis examination. The results of the study contribute to the literature by identifying skills that are associated with teacher candidates passing the Praxis examination