Findings
Dumb Jock?: A new study of high school students in North Carolina suggests that the "dumb jock'' stereotype may be off the mark. Roger Whitley, a doctoral candidate in education at East Carolina University in Greenville, looked at data on attendance, graduation, grades, and discipline referrals for 126,700 students at 133 high schools across the state. "For each of the variables we examined, the performances of the athletes were significantly better than those of the nonathletes,'' he says. For example, the mean grade-point average for all athletes was 2.86 on a 4.0 scale, compared with 2.0 for nonathletes. The gap was even wider between female athletes and nonathletes. In terms of attendance, athletes, on average, missed almost six fewer days during the 1994-95 school year than classmates who were not involved in sports. Whitley, a former jock turned school administrator, conducted his study in conjunction with the North Carolina High School Athletic Association. Neither he nor the association, however, offers any explanations for why student athletes seem to fare better than others in school.

Not Too Big, Not Too Small: The ideal high school enrolls 600 to 900
students--no more and no less, says a study released at this year's
meeting of the American Educational Research Association. "Students
learn less in small schools,'' said Valerie Lee, an associate professor
of education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "And in large
high schools, especially those enrolling over 2,100 students, they
learn considerably less.'' Lee and her co-author, Julia Smith of the
University of Rochester in New York, based their conclusions on a study
of nearly 10,000 students in 789 public, Roman Catholic, and elite
private high schools. Using data from the National Education
Longitudinal Study, a federally supported testing program that is
following 24,000 students, the researchers examined the test scores of
the same students as they moved from 8th to 10th to 12th grade. What
they found was that the relationship between higher test scores and
smaller schools is not a linear one. Some schools are either just too
small and resource-poor to support learning or too large and
impersonal. "Moreover, size seems to matter more for some students than
others,'' Lee said. "In schools enrolling large numbers of minority and
low-income students, learning falls off sharply as the schools become
larger or smaller than the ideal.'' The reality, however, is that most
high schools--especially those in urban areas with high concentrations
of disadvantaged students--enroll more than 900 students. A reasonable
solution, according to the researchers, might be to create
schools-within-a-school. But they also offered two cautions for
educators looking to try this approach: Don't make the newly created
schools too small, and don't make them into "specialty shops'' for
select groups of students.

Year-Round Schooling: Switching schools to a year-round schedule can
improve student achievement--if only slightly. So says Carolyn Calvin
Kneese, a researcher at the University of Houston. Kneese analyzed
findings from 15 studies on year-round education that have been
conducted since 1982. Two of the studies looked at single-track,
year-round programs in which all students followed the same attendance
schedule. Eight focused on multitrack programs, in which students were
assigned to one of several tracks operating on staggered schedules.
Multitrack programs usually are put in place to ease overcrowding,
while single-track programs are sometimes advocated as a way to improve
learning by cutting down on long breaks between school sessions. In the
rest of the studies, findings from both types of programs were lumped
together. (None of the schools studied had added days to the regular
school calendar.) Reporting in the winter issue of the Journal of
Research and Development in Education, Kneese says both types of
programs produced a slight positive effect on student achievement but
that the gains were greater in the single-track schools. She concedes,
however, that the improvements were not strong enough to merit calling
year-round schooling a sure-fire solution to schools' problems. Most of
the studies, for example, were conducted after the new schedules had
been in place only a year. "Future studies need to be longitudinal and
to span at least four years of implementation,'' Kneese advises.

State SAT Rankings: Twelve years after researchers Brian Powell and
Lala Carr Steelman published a landmark critique of ranking states
according to their SAT scores, the practice is still widespread. A
range of people--from policymakers to radio talk-show hosts--continue
to cite the scores as a barometer of school success with little
understanding of what they actually mean. Now, in an article published
in the spring issue of the Harvard Educational Review, Powell (of
Indiana University) and Steelman (of the University of South Carolina)
take a second look at the Scholastic Assessment Test--this time using
1993 data. Their conclusion: Ranking states by SAT scores is just as
dicey a venture now as it was the last time they looked. The
researchers found once again that such rankings change dramatically
once the participation rates in states and the class rank of the
test-takers are taken into account. Alaska, Colorado, and Connecticut,
for example, would see their standings improve, while Alabama,
Arkansas, and Kentucky would suffer a drop in status. "The reason is
simple,'' they write. "In states where the percentage of students
taking the SAT is high, the proportion of less motivated or
low-achieving students taking the test is also high, thus yielding a
lower average state SAT score.'' What is more, Powell and Steelman
found a direct relationship between higher per-pupil spending and high
SAT rankings--contrary to other researchers' claims that money makes
little difference in student achievement. "Whether we rely upon the
percentage of eligible test-takers or class ranking,'' the authors say,
"we should at the very least adjust for the vast variation between
states in the different groups of students taking the test.''
--Debra Viadero
Vol. 07, Issue 09, Page 1-24
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.