School Attainment Research Articles

Social Class and Educational Attainment: Do Blacks Benefit Less from Increases in Parents’ Social Class Status?

Classic and contemporary studies show that greater social class status is associated with higher levels of education for youth. However, racialized processes might constrain the benefits blacks receive from increases in parents’ social class. In this study the authors use the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to estimate whether race moderates the relationship among three common measures of youths’ social class during high school (parents’ occupations, family income, and parents’ level of education) and their college enrollment two years after high school and educational attainment eight years after high school. The results suggest that black youth receive lower benefits from social class than whites for both outcomes, and parents’ gender plays a role in the racial differences in the link between social class and both outcomes. The authors also find a three-way interaction with family structure for mothers (among race, social class, and family structure); among youth not in two-parent households, blacks benefit less than whites from mothers’ occupational prestige on enrollment. This study extends the literature on social class and racial inequality in education by explicitly testing whether black youth receive lower benefits from social class in their attainment. Doing so separately for mothers’ and fathers’ social class characteristics uncovers a nuanced pattern useful for understanding race as a moderator to social class.

School Culture to Serve Performance of Madrasah in Indonesia

<p>School cultures grow with school ages, school objectives, social changes, and school level, whose success depends on leadership styles. This study, aims to see school cultures development and attainments of the schools. Taking in Kediri, Indonesia, this study used grounded theory and selected Senior Islamic School (MAN): MAN 1, MAN 2 and MAN Tarokan, 12 participants, and employed theme-based analysis. The study revealed MAN 2 is the best to maintain school cultures and achieve better academic attainments. School cultures are derived from (1) values, norms, and behavior; (2). school physical environment: beauty, security, comfort, tranquility, and cleanliness; (3). school system: quality based, principal leadership, discipline and order, rewards and incentives, expectations for achievement, access to information, evaluation, intensive and open communication. Schools with established school cultures achieve better academic and non-academic attainments.</p>

Cyberbullying and emotional distress in adolescents: the importance of family, peers and school

The paper examines the role of socioeconomic status, family, parenting styles, peer relations and school factors in cyber-bullying with focus on emotional consequences. A survey was conducted with 259 participants (202 female) aged 19–25. 58,1% experienced some form of cyber violence, and 56,8% did not bully others. 21% report regular cyber victimization with distinct emotional disturbance (31,3%), anger (20,8%), helplessness (13,1%) and sorrow (20,5%). Girls talk to others about cyberbullying more often (p<,05). Boys (p<,05) and younger participants cyberbully others more (p<,01). Students with lower academic achievement cyberbully others more than those with average academic success (p<,01). Cyberbullying correlates negatively with traditional protective factors in risk behaviour aetiology (family, school and peer relations). Younger male participants (p<,01), who have less educated mothers (p<,05), lower academic achievement (p<,01) and report lower satisfaction with family life, peer relations and school attainment (p<,01) represent an average cyberbully profile. Age (p<,01) and school success (p<,01) predict cyberbullying for younger and academically less efficient participants. Emotional distress and reactiveness is the strongest predictor of cyber victimization (p<,001), while cyber victimization represents the strongest predictor for cyberbullying perpetration (p<,001). Peer pressure positively predicts cyber victimization (p<,01). Finally, lower family life quality predicts cyber victimization (p<,001), as well as cyberbullying perpetration (p<,05).

The Effect of Education and School Quality on Female Crime

This paper estimates the effects of educational attainment and school quality on crime among American women. Using changes in compulsory schooling laws as instruments, we estimate significant effects of schooling attainment on the probability of incarceration using Census data from 1960-1980. Using data from the 1960-90 Uniform Crime Reports, we also estimate that increases in average schooling levels reduce arrest rates for violent and property crime but not white collar crime. The estimated reductions in crime for women are smaller in magnitude than comparable estimates for men; however, the effects for women are larger in percentage terms (relative to baseline crime rates). Our results suggest small and mixed direct effects of school quality (as measured by pupil-teacher ratios, term length, and teacher salaries) on incarceration and arrests. Finally, we show that the effects of education on crime for women is unlikely to be due to changes in labor market opportunities and may be more related to changes in marital opportunities and family formation.

Adaptation of a mental development assessment tool for the evaluation of the long-term effect of a successful nutrition intervention in Ghana.

This study adapted a cognitive assessment tool to be used in evaluating nutrition interventions in developing countries and assessed its reliability and validity in Ghana. The tool was used to evaluate the long-term effect of the Enhancing Child Nutrition through Animal Source Food Management (ENAM) project. The former ENAM participants' children were contacted (now 13 to 15years old). The items in the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence-II were adapted, pretested, refined, and pretested again. Cross-sectional data collection was conducted with former ENAM participants (60 interventions and 51 comparison families) in one of ENAM's three sites (the Guinea Savanna zone). Data on participants' socio-economic status and food insecurity were collected, along with their children's intellectual functioning, dietary intake, school attainment, anthropometry, and symptoms of depression. Alpha coefficient of the verbal subscale improved between the first and second pretest (from .34 to .80). After controlling for age, the intelligence scores of the children were associated with their grade (r=.35, p=.001) and academic performance (r=.26 to .33, p<.05). The verbal scale was associated with their anthropometry (r=.24 to .27, p<.05). The intervention children still recorded a better dietary diversity score than controls (6.8 vs 5.8, p=.0001); however, significance was lost after adjusting for confounders. There were no significant group differences in growth or intellectual functioning. The adapted Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence-II tool performed well in evaluating adolescent intellectual functioning in rural Ghana, and there were no long-term effects of ENAM intervention on child growth and development.

Towards a pedagogical model of teaching with ICTs for mathematics attainment in primary school: A review of studies 2008–2018

This article reviews literature in the field of ICTs in teaching/learning mathematics at an elementary school level. The findings to date in the field of teaching with technology in mathematics classrooms are very conflictual, with some studies indicating that ICTs impact positively on achievement through altering pedagogy, while other studies indicate that the effect on achievement and pedagogy is in fact negative. The current paper seeks to address the conflictual data by analysing a variety of meta-analyses and studies in order to answer the following questions: Does pedagogy alter with the use of ICTs in grade 6 mathematics classrooms and if so, in what ways does it vary? Secondly, does student achievement in mathematics change with the use of ICTs as teaching tools and if so, in what ways does it do so? Findings from the review indicate that student achievement in mathematics can be positively impacted using technology, depending on the pedagogical practices used by teachers. Technology on its own appears to have no significant impact on student's attainment. There is a dearth of findings regarding pedagogical variation with ICTs outside of a single meta-analysis that indicates that a ‘constructivist’ approach to teaching/learning with technology is the most effective approach to developing students' conceptually. Due to this gap in the literature, the paper outlines a theoretical framework for providing a nuanced study of pedagogical variation with ICTs drawing on Cultural Historical Activity Theory and TPACK that can track pedagogical change along various dimensions.

Teaching computer programming with PRIMM: a sociocultural perspective

ABSTRACT Background and Context: Vygotsky's sociocultural theory emphasises the importance of language, mediation, and the transfer of skills and knowledge from the social into the cognitive plane. This perspective has influenced the development of PRIMM (Predict, Run, Investigate, Modify, Make), a structured approach to teaching programming. Objective: The objective of the study was to find out if using PRIMM to teach programming had an impact on learner attainment in secondary school, and the extent to which it was valuable for teachers. Method: We evaluated the use of PRIMM in 13 schools with 493 students aged 11-14 alongside a control group, using a mixed-methods approach. Teachers delivered programming lessons using the PRIMM approach for 8-12 weeks. Data were collected via a combination of a baseline test, a post-test to compare control and experimental groups, and teacher interviews. Findings: Learners performed better in the post test than the control group. Teachers reported several benefits of the PRIMM approach, including that PRIMM helped them to teach effectively in mixed-ability classes, enabling all learners to make progress. Implications: PRIMM makes a contribution to programming education research by building on previous work in effective pedagogy for teachers, and encouraging the use of language and dialogue to facilitate understanding.

Functional deficits and other psychiatric associations with abnormal scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) in older HIV-infected patients.

The authors assessed the association of physical function, social variables, functional status, and psychiatric co-morbidity with cognitive function among older HIV-infected adults. From 2012-2014, a cross-sectional study was conducted among HIV-infected patients ages 50 or older who underwent comprehensive clinical geriatric assessment. Two San Francisco HIV clinics. 359 HIV-infected patients age 50 years or older. Unadjusted and adjusted Poisson regression measured prevalence ratios and 95% confidence intervals for demographic, functional and psychiatric variables and their association with cognitive impairment using a Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) score < 26 as reflective of cognitive impairment. Thirty-four percent of participants had a MoCA score of < 26. In unadjusted analyses, the following variables were significantly associated with an abnormal MoCA score: born female, not identifying as homosexual, non-white race, high school or less educational attainment, annual income < $10,000, tobacco use, slower gait speed, reported problems with balance, and poor social support. In subsequent adjusted analysis, the following variables were significantly associated with an abnormal MoCA score: not identifying as homosexual, non-white race, longer 4-meter walk time, and poor social support. Psychiatric symptoms of depressive, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorders did not correlate with abnormal MoCA scores. Cognitive impairment remains common in older HIV-infected patients. Counter to expectations, co-morbid psychiatric symptoms were not associated with cognitive impairment, suggesting that cognitive impairment in this sample may be due to neurocognitive disorders, not due to other psychiatric illness. The other conditions associated with cognitive impairment in this sample may warrant separate clinical and social interventions to optimize patient outcomes.

After Warnock: The Effects of Perverse Incentives in Policies in England for Students With Special Educational Needs

The 1978 Warnock Report made the case in the United Kingdom for a number of actions that, it was argued, would make the integration and support of young people with Special Educational Needs more effective. In the aftermath of this wave of policy development, a nascent tension between policies designed to achieve excellence and those seeking to achieve inclusive practice emerged. Whilst the devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales have continued to try to give priority to inclusion in education, in recent years these tensions in England have intensified and there is growing concern about the ways in which schools are managing the contradictions between these two policy streams. There is widespread public and political unrest about the variety of ways in which young people with special educational needs, who may be seen as a threat to a school attainment profiles, are being excised from the system either through formal exclusion or other, more clandestine, means. This paper charts this move from attempts to meet need with provision as outlined by Warnock to the current situation where the motives which drive the formulation of provision are driven by what are ultimately economic objects. We argue that policy changes in England in particular have resulted in perverse incentives for schools to not meet the needs of special educational needs students and which can result in their exclusion from school. These acts of exclusion in England are then compared to educational policies of segregation in Northern Ireland and then exemplified with data. We illustrate the impact of perverse incentives on practices of inclusion and exclusion through an analysis of interview data of key stakeholders gathered in a recent study of practices of school exclusion in England.

Just Another Level? Comparing Quantitative Patterns of Global Expansion of School and Higher Education Attainment

The expansion of higher education enrollment and attainment is a key uncertainty in the education profile of future populations. Many studies have examined cross-national determinants of higher education expansion as well the understanding of expansion through the relationship between higher education and the labor market. Early work established a typology for levels of enrollment, but recent empirical studies on the global growth of higher education attainment are scarce, and available projections resort to imposing ad hoc limits on future expansion. This study addresses this gap by comparing the trajectories of higher education expansion with those experienced at other levels on their course to universal or near-universal access. We demonstrate that a population-level model of expansion toward universal access fits higher education as well as lower levels of education (i.e., primary and secondary education). In other words, that there is no prima facie evidence of a ceiling in higher education enrollment that would indicate saturation significantly below 100 % participation. Claims that are premised on such a ceiling should therefore consider empirical evidence for this assumption in their analysis. These findings contribute to discussions on higher education expansion as well as studies of higher education and the labor market.

Worker Heterogeneity and the Asymmetric Effects of Minimum Wages

This paper explores the notion that minimum wages affect different lowskilled workers asymmetrically due to productivity differences. In a search model with worker heterogeneity, a rising minimum wage lowers the employment and labor force participation of the least productive workers by pricing them out of the market, while having the opposite effect on other low-skilled workers that remain hirable. CPS data supports these predictions; a rise in the minimum reduces the employment and labor force participation of teenagers with less than high school education, but has the opposite effect on prime-age workers with high school attainment. The calibrated model requires small firm surpluses to match these observations. If firm surplus is small due to high nonmarket activity values, a moderate rise in the minimum improves aggregate welfare even when the worker's bargaining weight is high.

Crises Management for Goal Attainment in Public Secondary Schools in Bonny, Rivers State: Importance of Planning

This study examined how crises can be managed in public secondary schools in Bonny Local Government Area of Rivers State, Nigeria. Two research questions guided the study which adopted descriptive survey design. The sample was 150 staff made up of 134 teachers and 16 principals, census sampling technique was used. A researcher-structured instrument titled “Crises Management for Goal Attainment Questionnaire’’ (CMGAQ), was used to collect data. Three experts in the area of measurement and evaluation validated the instrument. The reliability was established using Pearson Product Moment Correlation which yielded a reliability index of 0.89. The research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation. Findings showed effective planning, free flow of communication and joint problem-solving as being important in crises management. Recommendations include the need for principals to plan ahead how to avert crises, use good communication skills in managing crises including ensuring the existence of good relationship between the school and the host community.

Apprenticeship as a stepping stone to better jobs: Evidence from Brazilian matched employer-employee data

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the Brazilian Apprenticeship program adopted at a large scale since 2000. In particular, we investigate whether the program is a better stepping stone to permanent jobs when compared to other forms of temporary jobs. Similar to other apprenticeship initiatives around the world, the Brazilian program trains young workers under special temporary contracts aiming to help them successfully complete the transition from school to work. We make use of a matched employee-employer dataset covering all formal employees in Brazil, including apprentices. Our identification strategy exploits a discontinuity in the eligibility to enter the program in the early 2000s, when 17 was the age limit to take part in the program. This strategy allows us to consider selection based on unobservable characteristics. We find that the program increases the probability of employment in permanent jobs and decreases turnover rates and formal labor market experience in 2-3- and 4-5-year horizons. These results are consistent with a positive effect of the program on reservation utilities of workers and on their efforts to expand skills. This is also confirmed by the data as we find substantial impacts on schooling attainment. We also find evidence that the skill requirements of the apprentices’ occupation affect the likelihood of obtaining an open-ended job in the short run and the education achievement in the medium run. The results also evince much larger effects of the program for workers who had their first job in large firms.

Inequality of opportunity in educational attainment in the Middle East and North Africa: Evidence from household surveys

Education is widely considered as the most important path to social mobility in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), yet there are very few studies of the extent to which it fulfills this promise. In this paper we use survey data from eight MENA countries to understand the relationship between schooling attainment of youth and the circumstances into which they are born, namely gender, parental education, parental household’s position in the per capita expenditure distribution and urban/rural location. We consider various attainment levels from the chance of entering any kind of schooling to attending upper secondary schooling and address the fact that many children are still in school by using a censored ordered probit model. We find high degrees of inequality of opportunity in school attainment, especially with respect to attending secondary school. The most opportunity unequal countries in this respect are Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Jordan, Palestine and Tunisia are the least opportunity unequal in this respect. This paper builds on a previous study of inequality of opportunity in educational achievement, which showed that in most MENA countries, learning opportunities are not equal. In this study, we find that - even in attending and staying in school- the playing field is not level.

Do trainee teachers harm pupil attainment? Isolating the effect of pre‐service teachers on contemporaneous pupil performance in ‘high‐stakes’ tests

The prevalence of ‘pre‐service’ or ‘trainee’ teachers in schools is rising in England, driven by the expansion of school‐led routes to qualified teacher status and increasing demand for newly qualified teachers. This may have important implications for schools, which have historically been concerned with the impact of trainee teachers on their pupils’ attainment. There are, however, confounding factors which affect both the decision to host a trainee teacher and pupil attainment. We empirically model the impact of trainee teachers on contemporaneous pupil attainment in ‘high‐stakes’ exams, exploiting unique data combining national administrative data on pupil test scores with a survey of schools’ involvement with initial teacher training over multiple academic years. We use school fixed effects to account for time‐invariant school factors which may determine both schools’ teacher training decisions and pupil attainment. Counter to schools’ concerns, we find that pupil attainment in high‐stakes assessments, on average, is not significantly affected by the number of trainee teachers. This is an important empirical finding, as it suggests that the rapid expansion of school‐led teacher training is not likely to have a detrimental effect on pupil attainment in England, conditional on the set of schools that choose to engage with initial teacher training remaining similar: trainee teachers may still affect pupil attainment in schools that do not currently participate in initial teacher training, as these schools are typically more constrained.

Age of Menarche, Adolescent Sexual Intercourse and Schooling Attainment of Women

AbstractWe use data from the 1970 British Cohort Study to measure the effect of adolescent sexual intercourse on female schooling attainment. We emphasize the appropriate use of menarcheal age as an instrumental variable (IV) for early intercourse. Our analysis suggests that developmental trajectories vary with menarcheal age and, therefore, capturing variations in individual cognitive capacities induced by pubertal timing is crucial for the validity of the IV identification strategy. Our empirical results indicate that adolescent sexuality reduces full‐time education by approximately one year. Given that 37 percent of females in our data exited virginity in adolescence, the aggregate loss of human capital as measured by average years of female schooling could be up to one‐third of a year.

Childhood risk and protective factors for early desisters, late desisters and life-course persistent offenders

The aim of this article is to investigate the extent to which childhood risk and protective factors predict later persistence or desistance in criminal careers, as it has been argued that childhood factors are not predictive. In the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, 411 London males have been followed up from age 8 to age 56. This article investigates age 8-10 risk and protective factors for 37 life-course-persistent offenders (first offense up to age 20, last offense at age 40 or later), 38 late desisters (first offense up to age 20, last offense at age 21-39), 50 early desisters (first and last offenses up to age 20), 41 late onset offenders (first offense at age 21 or later), and 227 nonoffenders. 18 males were excluded from the analysis because they were not at risk of a recorded conviction from age 40 onwards (because of death or emigration). The results showed that several childhood factors predicted persistence compared with desistance. Individual and school risk factors (e.g. low popularity and low school attainment) were the most important predictors of whether an offender up to age 20 persisted after this age or desisted. Family protective factors (e.g. good child-rearing and high parental interest in education) were most important in protecting offenders from becoming life-course-persistent offenders and encouraging desistance before age 40.

Heterogeneous Treatment Under Regression Discontinuity Design: Application to Female High School Enrolment

AbstractThis paper undertakes a regression discontinuity (RD) framework with multiple cutoffs unlike typical RD setting where researchers normalize the score variable and pool all the observations. This paper explores this heterogeneity in the effect of Islamic mayor on female secular high schooling in Turkey using the multiple cutoff RD framework developed in Cattaneo et al. (2016). The presence of many parties in the 1994 municipality election in Turkey means that vote share of the strongest opponent party can vary substantially leading to different cutoffs. Meyersson (2014) finds that Islamic mayors of 1994 promoted female high schooling using a normalized and pooled RD framework, which averages the effect across all the different cutoffs. We extend his work by segregating the effect of Islamic mayor across different opponent party's vote shares. Our results suggest that the positive effect on female secular high school attainment was more pronounced in municipalities where the strongest opponent party was secular than where the opponent was conservative. This heterogeneity can be attributed to a policy change in 1999, which restricted religious high school graduates from entering universities.

Mental Health, Schooling Attainment and Polygenic Scores: Are There Significant Gene-Environment Associations?

Mental Health, Schooling Attainment and Polygenic Scores: Are There Significant Gene-Environment Associations?

How Trajectories of Disadvantage Help Explain School Attainment

This article illustrates the links between different ways of assessing disadvantage at school and subsequent qualification outcomes at age 16 in England. Our previous work has compared variables that represent current or recent snapshots of disadvantage (such as eligibility for free school meals [FSM]) with long-term summary variables and found the latter to improve measures of both social segregation between schools and explanations of raw-score differences in attainment. This new work takes an even more detailed longitudinal approach, modeling the course of one age cohort of 550,000 pupils from the National Pupil Database through their entire schooling to the age of 16 in 29 distinct analytical steps, using “effect” sizes, correlations, and a regression model. The steps represent stages such as what is known about each pupil when they were born, who they attended school with at age 10, and where they lived at age 14. The model also includes variables representing where data are missing for any pupil in any year. Using capped Key Stage 4 points as an outcome measure, these stages can predict the outcome with R = .90. This is considerably higher than for models using either snapshots or summaries of disadvantage. Key predictors are poverty and special educational needs at age 5, and throughout schooling, coupled with prior attainment at ages 6, 10, and 13. With predictors fed into the model in life order, there is little evidence of differential progress for different language and ethnic minority groups and no evidence of regional differences or a type of school effect. The article concludes with the implications of these results for assessing disadvantage when considering school contexts and for policy makers. Given the small but apparently consistent negative school composition “effects” in every year, one clear implication is that school intakes should be as mixed as possible both socially and academically.