Empirical Background Sample Clauses

Empirical Background. Non-SCCT empirical studies of premedical career choice and persistence Non-SCCT literature (that is, studies that do not cite SCCT as their guiding framework) draws strong predictions about the relationship between experiences and career persistence. Some of the literature supports ideas that experiences that could be linked to self-efficacy are important for career choice/persistence decisions. These studies follow how the challenging coursework of the premedical track inclines students away from pursuit of a medical degree. Some of this literature specifically hones in on difficulties for women and minority students, seeking to explain and ameliorate their historic underrepresentation as medical professionals. Xxxx, Xxxxxxxx, and Xxxxx, for example, found that in a longitudinal survey study of Stanford undergraduates, women and under-represented minorities were less likely to maintain interest in a medical career, largely because of the difficulty of premedical courses like chemistry (Xxxx, Xxxxxxxx and Xxxxx, 2008). Other studies focus on the difficulty of the track for the larger population. A subsequent survey study by Xxxx and colleagues showed that the chemistry coursework was not only a deterrent for women and minority students (thought it did affect them disproportionately), but also served as a major deterrent for all other demographic categories as well (Xxxx et al, 2009). A longitudinal study of attrition data done by Xxxxx Xxxx in 2010 showed that in addition to pre-collegiate preference (as demonstrated by marked preference on college application), grades in STEM classes were one of the strongest motivators of discontinuing STEM classes such as the ones on the premedical track (Xxxx, 2010). Another trend in the literature indicates that experiences with the potential to affect outcome expectations might play an important role in career choice and persistence. For example, in a national cross-sectional survey of college students, Barondess and Xxxxxx (1993) examined what factors drew undergraduates toward medical careers versus what factors repelled them. In a random sample selected from AAMC data, they compared 500 medical school applicants with 277 qualified nonapplicants (scored well enough on the MCAT to be competitive applicants but chose not to apply). Xxxxxxxxx and Xxxxxx found that students not interested in applying to medical school were more likely than not to believe their work choice would bring them as much satisfaction and the o...

Empirical Background. Research on L2 acquisition has shown that some properties of languages are more complicated to acquire than others (Xxxxxx et al., 2019, 4). For L1 Norwegian learners of English, one of these properties is subject-verb agreement, especially the use of the third person singular "-s". Firstly, this section will provide data on L2 English agreement marking in general, and then, more specifically examine agreement marking in L1 Norwegian learners of L2 English. Following this, the differences between agreement marking in Norwegian and English are highlighted in 2.1.3. In the following study, the group under investigation is adolescents (15-16 years); however, most of the data that has been collected on subject-verb agreement marking is from adult learners (Garshol, 2019, 40). Therefore, some of the studies that have been chosen for comparison are mainly from adult learners. On the other hand, these can be considered viable for contrast because of the typical English proficiency for Norwegian 15-16-year-olds. The reasoning behind this is that obligatory English instruction ends in the first year of upper secondary school in the Norwegian school system, and the participants of this study were halfway through their last year of lower secondary school when the tests were conducted. In this respect, they can be viewed as almost finished with their formal English education and, therefore close to the proficiency level of a typical Norwegian adult. Their proficiency is also reflected in test scores, which are discussed more closely in section 4. Furthermore, proficiency can vary significantly in the same age group; therefore, using age as the sole measurement of proficiency may be inaccurate. According to theories on L2 acquisition, like The Bottleneck Hypothesis (Xxxxxxxxx, 2008, 2016) and Syntax Before Morphology (Lardiere, 1998a; Lardiere, 1998b; White, 2003), which will be discussed later in this section, functional morphology is especially challenging to acquire for L2 learners. To further highlight this, the following studies which have examined the acquisition of functional morphology in L2 English learners are discussed.