Beyond Academic Performance: The Effects of an Evolution-Informed School Environment on Student Performance and Well-being

Abstract

While education has the narrow goal of teaching subject matter, schools are also charged with the broad goal of fostering behavioral, social, and cultural development. Yet, as many students fail to achieve proficient scores on academic exams, education policymakers respond by narrowing their focus—accentuating content instruction over other developmental achievements. With an emphasis on grades over all else, the narrow goals of education become even narrower and broad goals are sacrificed altogether. This chapter shows how the narrow and broad goals of education can be achieved simultaneously. We continue a report on the Regents Academy (RA), a program for at-risk high school students in Binghamton New York that was designed to create an optimal cooperative learning environment. In a previous publication (Wilson, Kauffman & Purdy, 2011), we showed that the RA had a powerful effect on academic performance (grades and pass rates on the state-mandated exams) in a randomized controlled trial. In this chapter, we show that the RA also had a powerful effect on general developmental assets such as individual well-being, interest in learning, family support, and school support. Our study, along with other success stories in the literature, shows that the broad and narrow goals of education can be achieved together when education is viewed as a form of cooperation.