The authors replicate and extend the research on future workers' union attitudes, organizational beliefs, and work ethic. Selected demographic and attitudinal data were collected from a sample of 644 students at a small, western Pennsylvania university. Compared to earlier research on pre-employment predictors of union attitudes, this study is based on a much larger sample size and includes a crosssection of majors. The results offer additional support for the family socialization process; in general, future professionals and business managers are more sympathetic to labor unions if they were children of union members. In addition, the results show that student major has a significant and systematic impact on both positive and negative union attitudes.
This paper represents a very preliminary analysis of how the incorporation of a music project influences learning and student perceptions in a pre-principles economics course. Consumer Economics is a course taught at Clarion University that caters to students who are non-economics and non-business majors; primarily students majoring in elementary education. While the literature in economic education has discussed using music to teach undergraduate students, nothing has been done to see how the use of this nontraditional approach influences students learning economics at a lower level. By looking at average scores on final examinations, attendance records, and student evaluations for sections of Consumer Economics that both include and exclude a music project to teach economics, this paper fills that void in the literature. This paper shows that there is evidence to suggest that the incorporation of a music project that links musical lyrics to economic concepts has a positive influence on course attendance and important student evaluation results. Changing the music project to include a segment where students write their own song lyrics initially appears to have a positive influence on final examination scores. Future analysis will need to determine whether this is a persistent result and not influenced by other individual student characteristics.
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