The purpose of the study was to compare the academic stress of freshmen in a community college with that of freshmen in a university. An additional purpose was to determine if gender, ethnicity, or semester course load was related to perceived academic stress. The sample consisted of a total of 303 university and community college freshmen from English and Psychology classes at the University of North Texas and Richland Community College during the spring semester, 1989. The instrument that was administered to these volunteer students was the Academic Stress Test, a 35-item checklist of possible academic stressors. The students were asked to check the items which were perceived by them to be stressful and had occurred during the current semester. The T-statistic was used to analyze the total mean stress score for each variable being considered. Multiple regression was used to determine if there was any possibility that the variables might have a predictive effect for academic stress. It was found that for these freshmen students there was a significant difference between the perceived academic stress of community college freshmen and university freshmen. The mean academic stress score for university freshmen was higher than the mean for community college freshmen. …

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect on student learning from the sequence in which microeconomics and macroeconomics courses are taken. The sample for this study consisted of all students enrolled in 23 sections of Economics 1100 (Principles of Microeconomics) and 10 sections of Economics 1110 (Principles of Macroeconomics) during the fall semester, 1987, at the University of North Texas. The sample also consisted of all students enrolled in 14 sections of Economics 1100 and 12 sections of Economics 1110 during the spring semester, 1988, at the University of North Texas. The instruments chosen for use in measuring cognitive gains were two versions, each with 14 items, selected from the Joint council on Economic Educations's Revised Test of Understanding College Economics. Data were analyzed using hierarchical regression on five models. Each model used a different dependent variable to measure cognitive gain. The dependent variables were additive grade points, additive absolute improvement posttest scores, gap-closing posttest scores, microeconomic gap-closing scores and macroeconomic gap-closing posttest scores. The general hypothesis that students who complete microeconomics instruction followed by macroeconomics instruction have significantly higher cognitive gains than students who complete macroeconomics instruction followed by microeconomics instruction was not verified by the …