Large Public High School Research Articles

Physical Activity and Health-Related Fitness of Grade 11 Students

The lockdown period has led to a decline in physical activity and fitness among students with increasingly embraced sedentary behaviour. This study aimed to assess the physical activity (PA) level and health-related fitness (HRF) status of students according to sex and academic strand, also determining whether significant differences existed. The study was conducted in a large public high school responding to the International Physical Activity Questionnaire-Long Form (IPAQ) and the Philippine Physical Fitness Test. The study employed a descriptive-comparative research design and employed stratified random sampling with proportional allocation. The students demonstrated a moderate PA level, regardless of sex and academic strand. Regarding health-related fitness, most students exhibited normal BMI, excellent strength in the basic plank, good cardiovascular endurance in the 3-minute step test, good flexibility in the zipper test, fair flexibility in the sit and reach test, and poor performance in the push-up. Furthermore, significant differences were found in BMI and strength when grouped by sex. In conclusion, most students maintain moderate physical activity, surpassing local restrictions and avoiding sedentary behaviour. Also, most students have shown muscular endurance and flexibility in various tasks but have yet to focus as much on strengthening their arms and core muscles. The FIT-UP YOU program has been developed to address this issue, focusing on improving weight and overall HRF status among young overweight/obese and underweight students.

Reflective Practice: Effective Strategies for Combatting Challenges with Grading Policies

This reflective practice aims to identify and evaluate possible strategies to overcome certain limitations of the world language departmental grading policies in the high school where I teach. As a French teacher at a large public suburban high school in the northeastern United States, I sought to examine the problem of not knowing which strategies were most effective in overcoming my challenges with specific grading policies. John Dewey’s theories of reflection and experience provided the theoretical lens with which I explored the problem. I identified strategies associated with four categories of challenges and engaged in reflective evaluation and decision-making based on my experiences and the expertise of other scholars. The reflective process was stimulating, complex, and contemplative. Engaging in reflective practice was critical to evaluating the merits of my practices and identifying effective strategies to overcome certain limitations. I hope other educators, administrators, and policymakers can benefit from this reflection when considering best practices for grading students.

The Impact of School Closures on Service Utilization in School-Based Health Centers.

The pandemic was followed by a severe mental health crisis in youth with both an increase in the prevalence of mental health problems and a decrease in requests for and access to care. data were extracted from the school-based health center records in three large public high schools that include under-resourced and immigrant communities. Data from 2018/2019 (pre-pandemic), 2020 during the pandemic, and then in 2021 after the return to in-person school were compared regarding the impact of in-person, telehealth, and hybrid care. Despite the increase in mental health needs globally, there was a dramatic decrease in referrals, evaluations, and the total number of students seen for behavioral health care. The time course of this decrease in care was specifically associated with the transition to telehealth, although treatment did not return to pre-pandemic levels, even after in-person care became available. Despite ease of access and increased need, these data suggest that telehealth has unique limitations when delivered in school-based health centers.

Adolescent Feelings on COVID-19 Distance Learning Support: Associations With Mental Health, Social-Emotional Health, Substance Use, and Delinquency

PurposeSchool social support is associated with improved adolescent wellbeing. However, positive school relationships were potentially disrupted when schools transitioned to distance learning in 2020 to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This study investigated associations among perceived distance learning school support, mental health, social-emotional wellbeing, substance use, and delinquency among low-income, public high school students. MethodsWe analyzed longitudinal survey data, collected between June 2020 and June 2021, from 372 students attending five large urban public high schools. Mixed-effects regression models examined associations among changes in distance learning support and changes in mental health, social-emotional wellbeing, substance use, and delinquency, controlling for time, social-demographics, and baseline health. ResultsIn this predominantly Latinx (83%) sample, within-person increases in perceived distance learning support were associated with improved mental health, increased grit, increased self-efficacy, and decreased stress. Between-person differences in distance learning support indicated that students reporting greater support had improved mental and social-emotional outcomes. Although there were no within-person associations among distance learning support and hopelessness or delinquency, students with greater distance learning support (between-person) had lower levels of hopelessness and lower odds of engaging in any delinquent behavior. There were no associations between distance learning support and 30-day substance use. DiscussionSchool social support, even without students physically on campus, may be critical to adolescent health behaviors and social-emotional outcomes.

Early College High School/Dual Enrollment 2.0

Urban and Metropolitan Colleges and Universities often serve a population that can benefit from an early college strategy. Colleges serving first-generation and low-income students often have lower retention and graduation rates than their peer institutions, as students from large urban public high schools can struggle to navigate the college classrooms and support system. While students may have achieved respectable GPAs and test scores in their high school buildings, they can fail to translate these skills at the college level, finding themselves on academic probation or worse. As researcher Anthony Jack has described in his landmark study, The Privileged Poor, students coming from large, urban districts are doubly disadvantaged by their experiences in schools; the skills that have allowed these students to get through their high schools are counterproductive at the college level (Jack, 2019).
 Using an evidence-based approach, programs being launched now by colleges and universities focus on the core missions of early college and dual enrollment programs, connecting youth less likely to attend college directly out of high school with powerful programming that propels them towards successful completion of degrees and to the start of their career. This article presents perspectives from a range of institutions (high school, two-year institutions, four-year institutions, and philanthropic investors) that are rethinking these models to maximize community impact and affordability to students and families.

Wearing Policy

In this personal account, the author recounts navigating a school uniform policy as a new teacher in a large public high school in Baltimore. He loosely situates this telling in the recent history of the public school uniform movement, of which Baltimore was central. Writing in an urgent present tense, the author details the many complexities posed by a rigid policy regulating students’ bodies. Unfolding over the course of a single school year, this article charts a system newcomer’s evolving understanding of the uniform policy, a school, and his students. The article additionally raises broader considerations about policy enforcement in classrooms and probes the social and political implications of policies schools prioritize.

Interlocking Inequalities: Digital Stratification Meets Academic Stratification

This article examines the effects of digital inequality in conjunction with curricular tracking on academic achievement. Capitalizing on an original survey administered to seniors (fourth-year secondary school students), our survey data ( N = 972) come from a large American public high school with a predominantly disadvantaged student body. The school’s elective tracking system and inadequate digital resources make for an excellent case study of the effects of a differentiated curriculum and digital inequalities on academic achievement. Multilevel random-effects and fixed-effects regression models applied to the survey data reveal the important role played by digital inequalities in shaping academic achievement as measured by GPA. As the models establish, academic achievement is positively correlated with both duration of digital experience and usage intensity regarding academically useful computing activities, even when students’ curricular and class placement are taken into account. In contrast, both leisure computing and smartphone usage are negatively correlated with academic achievement as measured by GPA. Also with regard to GPA, findings show that students in the higher curricular tracks benefit more from longer durations of digital experience than do students in lower curricular tracks. These results underscore the importance of focusing attention on the ways in which digital inequalities combine with curricular tracking in shaping academic achievement.

Are all schools created equal? Learning environments in small and large public high schools in New York City

Over the past two decades, high school reform has been characterized by a belief that “smaller is better.” Much of the expected academic benefit from attending small schools has been credited to their better learning environments. There is little empirical support for this claim, however, and the existing research fails to provide causal evidence. Moreover, recent studies in New York City have shown that students attending newly created small schools do better academically relative to students attending both large and older established small schools. Are these differences in academic outcomes also mirrored by differences in learning environments? In this paper, we address this question by exploring the impact of attending large compared to small high schools on students’ learning environments, considering the differences between small high schools formed in two different eras with different missions and resources. We use a unique data set of school and student-level data from New York City public high school students entering 9th grade in 2008–09 and 2009–10 to examine students’ attitudes about school learning environments along three dimensions: interpersonal relationships, academic expectations and support, and social behavior and safety. While OLS results show that students attending small schools (new and old) perceive better learning environments, instrumenting for selection into these schools challenges those results. In general, it is not clear that small schools provide better learning environments than large schools. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom that the higher academic performance of students in small schools is driven by a better learning environment.

Moving beyond the Emphasis on Bullying: A Generalized Approach to Peer Aggression in High School

Heightened attention to bullying in research and in the media has led to a proliferation of school climate surveys that ask students to report their level of involvement in bullying. In this study, the authors reviewed the challenges associated with measuring bullying and the implications they have on the reliability of school climate surveys. Then they used data from a sample of 810 students in a large public high school in New Jersey to evaluate the merits of using a more generalized definition of aggression in school climate research. Similar to national surveys of bullying, the authors found that boys were more likely than girls to be involved as aggressors, victims, and victim-aggressors for verbal aggression, physical aggression, threats, and damage to property. Girls were more likely to be involved in social aggression. Few differences were observed in aggressive behaviors by grade, but grade level moderated the differences by gender for all types of aggression. The findings demonstrate what school social workers can expect to learn about school climate by using a survey instrument to measure the prevalence of specific categories of aggression that do not include the requisite power differential, a minimum duration of victimization, or an intentionality test.

Analysis of cyberbullying sensitivity levels of high school students and their perceived social support levels

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to determine the cyberbullying sensitivity levels of high school students and their perceived social supports levels, and analyze the variables that predict cyberbullying sensitivity. In addition, whether cyberbullying sensitivity levels and social support levels differed according to gender was also investigated. While current communication technologies such as mobile phones, the Internet and social network sites provide new opportunities for learning and interaction, they may also pose a threat to personal security. The rapid increase in access to information and communication technologies by young people can also cause those technologies to be used for bullying their peers – called cyberbullying.Design/methodology/approach– In this study, the cyberbullying sensitivity levels of high school students and their perceived social support levels were determined, and some variables (perceived social support, gender and academic success) which predicted sensitivity related to cyberbullying were analyzed. A total of 433 students studying in a large public high school located at the middle part of Turkey voluntarily participated in this study.Findings– The findings of this research show that both the cyberbullying sensitivities of the students and their levels of the perceived social support were high and that both the cyberbullying sensitivities of the female students and their perceived social support levels were higher than the ones of the male students. Based on the result of stepwise regression analysis that investigate the predicting factors related to cyberbullying sensitivities of the students, perceived social support was found to be the strongest predicting factor.Originality/value– It can be seen that most young people have little information about cyberbullying and they lack information about basic e-security applications. Accordingly, most young people are victims or potential victims of cyberbullying. In conclusion, to remove victimhood due to cyberbullying or reduce it to a minimum from an optimistic point of view, not only risky processes but also how the environment should protect young people from developing incompatible behaviors and how to increase their sensitivity should be taken into consideration. It may be said that the findings that we obtained in our research may contribute to relevant studies from the point of developing preventive programs against cyberbullying.

“I’m Not Going to Be, Like, for the AP”

Advancement to postsecondary education for English language learners (ELLs) can be seriously constrained by a lack of academic preparation during high school. Currently, ELLs lag behind their non-ELL peers in their level of access to advanced college-preparatory courses. Through a qualitative case study of ELL education at a large public high school, we examine the educational practices that result in ELLs’ restricted curricular choices. The findings expose the way in which ELLs’ chances for rigorous academic preparation are systematically reduced and point to the importance of providing ELLs with high-level academic curriculum while also supplying linguistic scaffolding that makes such learning possible.

A science career story.

I was valedictorian of a large public high school in Florida, attended a top liberal arts college—Swarthmore—and majored in physics. After a short, post-college stint as a small-town journalist, I entered the physics Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I connected early with a research project that allowed me to publish often and well, although I did not love the work. I finished my Ph.D. fairly quickly—faster than I needed to really because my wife, a chemist, was still in graduate school. So I stayed in the same lab for a postdoc, doing the same work, funding the position with a grant proposal written by me and submitted in my adviser's name. From graduate school on, I do not remember receiving a single piece of career advice. A year or so into my postdoc, my adviser retired. I took over his lab, earning a very long title: visiting research assistant professor. I inherited some '80s-vintage electronics and a '60s-era lab with a desk in the corner. ![Figure][1] I appeared successful. I was running my own funded lab and publishing in good journals. ILLUSTRATION: MARC ROSENTHAL As my wife approached the end of her Ph.D., we began to consider our “two-body problem.” We agreed that we would accept the first good offer either of us received. My job-market timing could not have been worse. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc sent many physicists and other scientists streaming west. Big corporate labs were downsizing and moving away from basic research, sending veteran physicists onto the academic job market. The early '90s employment crisis among young Ph.D. physicists made news. (You can read about it in Science at .) I appeared successful. I was running my own funded lab and publishing in good journals. But it wasn't long before I realized that I wasn't competitive for tenure-track positions at the institutions where I wanted to work, including the one where I was already working. One rejection letter among the many I received thanked me for being part of a “remarkable cohort” of more than a thousand applicants for a single faculty post. I believe the number actually exceeded 1300. My wife applied for just one job and got the offer. I became the trailing spouse, following her to Maine, where she took up a faculty post. I took pride in defying science's gender stereotypes. It was surprisingly easy to walk away from the career that I had worked so long and hard to attain. The hard part came later as I lost my knowledge of science and saw my mathematical facility dwindle, and as I struggled to fashion an identity that wasn't linked to professional attainment. I turned to writing, and when I wasn't writing, I was repairing and maintaining a passive-solar house in the country: shoveling snow, hauling tons of firewood up a steep hill, planting a vegetable garden that didn't get enough sun, and fulfilling various back-to-nature cliches. For a while, I taught writing part-time to undergraduates; it was ideal training for the work that would come later. We soon had a son, and (except for the breastfeeding part) I was the primary parent. In 1999 I founded an Internet publication, The Post-Careerist, which was focused on living a rich post-professional life. Through connections I made online, I became science editor at a pioneering Internet publication, BlueEar. Then, via an acquaintance in Pakistan—this was early online networking, before LinkedIn and Facebook—I heard about a writer/editor position at Science 's Next Wave, Science Careers' predecessor. I sent an e-mail and within weeks found myself with a full-time job for the first time in years. A few years later, I became the editor of Science Careers. My science career story is hardly unusual. Indeed, what's remarkable is how much it shares with so many other nontraditional career stories: uncertainty, exploration, a difficult transition, self-invention, and (eventually) satisfaction. So what's your story? Send stories, perspectives, opinions, and observations on careers in the sciences to me at SciCareerEditor{at}aaas.org. [1]: pending:yes

Data analysis of the smart sports injury registry for high school athletes

BackgroundDue to the lack of comprehensive high school athletes' sports injury surveillance data in Florida, an injury registry was developed by the Sports Medicine and Athletic Related Trauma Institute (SMART)...

The role of person–environment interactions in increased alcohol use in the transition to college

Even among those at risk for problematic alcohol use, there is variability in developmental trajectories of drinking and related problems. This prospective study examined the role of person-environment interactions in increased drinking during the transition to college. The authors followed a sample of recent high school graduates to test whether protective environmental factors could delay increases in drinking among those high in trait-level risk factors. Participants completed web-based surveys. A sample of 1784 students in the incoming class of 2004 at a large public United States university completed high school and first-semester-of-college assessments. Participants completed self-report measures of alcohol use, alcohol-related problems, perceived awareness and caring from parents and other adults, sensation seeking and impulsivity. In the transition to college, high sensation seekers from more protective high school parental environments increased their alcohol use and problems more than did other students. Increases in alcohol problems were also high among more impulsive students from less protective environments. Whereas high sensation seekers drank equivalently in college regardless of high school-perceived awareness and caring, those who had greater high school-perceived awareness and caring did not experience as many alcohol-related problems in college. Differences in drinking trajectories may be a function of person-environment interactions. Risk associated with high sensation seeking may be masked among adolescents in protective environments, but its emergence in the college transition predicts increases in alcohol use and related problems.

Trends in Concussion Incidence in High School Sports

Background: Understanding the risk and trends of sports-related concussion among 12 scholastic sports may contribute to concussion detection, treatment, and prevention. Purpose: To examine the incidence and relative risk of concussion in 12 high school boys’ and girls’ sports between academic years 1997-1998 and 2007-2008. Study Design: Descriptive epidemiology study. Methods: Data were prospectively gathered for 25 schools in a large public high school system. All schools used an electronic medical record-keeping program. A certified athletic trainer was on-site for games and practices and electronically recorded all injuries daily. Results: In sum, 2651 concussions were observed in 10 926 892 athlete-exposures, with an incidence rate of 0.24 per 1000. Boys’ sports accounted for 53% of athlete-exposures and 75% of all concussions. Football accounted for more than half of all concussions, and it had the highest incidence rate (0.60). Girls’ soccer had the most concussions among the girls’ sports and the second-highest incidence rate of all 12 sports (0.35). Concussion rate increased 4.2-fold (95% confidence interval, 3.4-5.2) over the 11 years (15.5% annual increase). In similar boys’ and girls’ sports (baseball/softball, basketball, and soccer), girls had roughly twice the concussion risk of boys. Concussion rate increased over time in all 12 sports. Conclusion: Although the collision sports of football and boys’ lacrosse had the highest number of concussions and football the highest concussion rate, concussion occurred in all other sports and was observed in girls’ sports at rates similar to or higher than those of boys’ sports. The increase over time in all sports may reflect actual increased occurrence or greater coding sensitivity with widely disseminated guidance on concussion detection and treatment. The high-participation collision sports of football and boys’ lacrosse warrant continued vigilance, but the findings suggest that focus on concussion detection, treatment, and prevention should not be limited to those sports traditionally associated with concussion risk.

Transformative Life Skills: Pilot Study of a Yoga Model for Reduced Stress and Improving Self-Control in Vulnerable Youth

Two pilot studies demonstrate that a comprehensive multimodality intervention of Transformative Life Skills (TLS) consisting of Yoga poses (asana), breathing techniques (pranayama), and meditation (dhyana) can reduce perceived stress and increase self-control and self-awareness in at-risk and incarcerated youth. As part of a countywide violence prevention effort, Niroga Institute conducted daily 60-minute TLS programs at Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center (ACJJC). Additionally, a condensed 15-minute TLS protocol was implemented at El Cerrito High School, a large urban public high school. The effectiveness of TLS was evaluated using the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) and Tangney's Self-Control Scale (TSCS-13). Statistical analyses indicate a significant improvement in stress resilience, self-control, and self-awareness among the youth exposed to Niroga's TLS protocols. These results have substantial relevance to education and community-wide violence prevention.

From Display to Documentation to Discourse: The Challenge of Documentation in a High School

In this article, two secondary school educators explore the challenges of using documentation to support learning in a large public high school and explain why tackling those challenges is worthwhile. The authors discuss the problems they had in beginning to use documentation in the absence of high school exemplars—and in the presence of the time, space, and accountability mandates common in public secondary schools. They present key moments in their learning journeys that reveal the expectations, misconceptions, and habits of thought and practice that complicated their initial efforts to use documentation as a tool to support the learning of students and colleagues. Then, they offer the lessons they learned so that other secondary educators can more easily and effectively begin to incorporate documentation into their instruction and assessment repertoires in order to support authentic collaborative learning.

The Impact of School Bullying on Adolescents' Psychosocial Resources and Help-Seeking Intentions

School bullying has been recognised as having a major impact on mental health. Bullied students are often encouraged to seek help from others, but research indicates that adolescents experiencing problems tend not to ask for help. This study examines whether being bullied depletes psychological and social resources such that those who are bullied have lower intentions to seek help with this problem. Students (169 females, 153 males) from a large public high school in Australia completed a questionnaire assessing bullying prevalence, help-seeking and associated psychosocial factors. The results showed that being bullied was associated with poorer psychological health, fewer social resources and lower help-seeking intentions from informal sources (friends and family). The association between being bullied and low help-seeking intentions was explained principally by fewer social resources. All students indicated they were unlikely to seek help from formal sources (teachers, mental health workers, etc). Anti-bullying interventions should account for the negative psychological and social consequences of bullying, and the reluctance to seek help from formal sources.

Does “Connectedness” Matter? Evidence from a Social Network Analysis within a Small-School Reform

Background/Context Though cast in many styles and given different labels, the notion that one can improve schools by improving or changing the social context of learning is a common thread that runs through the arguments of many education reformers and scholars. Indeed, a common assertion in education reform is that one needs to create school environments with stronger community, where people are “better connected.” At the heart of such claims—and the topic of investigation for this article—is the notion that the nature of social interactions in schools is a crucial part of schooling. Purpose/Objective In this article, we use social network analysis—a powerful yet underused method in educational research—to gain insight into how social relations give rise to relative advantage within a group of students at a large public high school engaged in small-school reform. More specifically, we ask three questions of this sample of students: First, to what extent is academic performance “contagious” among peers? Second, after accounting for individual characteristics, is a student's location in a social network, as indicated by network density, associated with academic performance? If so, is a norm-enforcing or horizon expansion mechanism primarily responsible for this association? Third, is there a joint effect of peer achievement and network density on academic performance? Setting A large urban public high school implementing a school-within-a-school reform. Population/Participants/Subjects Grade 10 students within one of the schools-within-a-school. Research Design We connect variations in network composition and network structure to hypotheses about the interpersonal mechanisms at work between students. We combine detailed network data on the social relations between students with individual-level data from school records and then attempt to exploit variation in network characteristics across students to make inferences about the role of social relations with respect to academic performance. Data Collection and Analysis The specific data come from two sources: (1) school administrative records that contained information on student grade point averages, absences, standardized test scores, and demographics, and (2) the administration of a Web-based social network survey asking students to cite those with whom they interact in several academic and social contexts. Conclusions We find that network composition (as measured by lagged peer achievement) and network structure (as measured the density of ties between a student's peers) have no average association with student performance after accounting for individual-level characteristics. However, when interacting network composition and network structure, we find a significant joint effect. This implies that the advantages and disadvantages arising from a student's social relations are context dependent and, moreover, suggests that in order to diagnose the impact of building stronger community in schools, it is necessary to consider the network structure of students’ relationships when examining the influence of peers.

Children of Color: Psychological Interventions With Culturally Diverse Youth, 2nd ed.

Children of Color: Psychological Interventions With Culturally Diverse Youth, 2nd ed.