The Year Without Standardized Testing

by Steven Singer

Last year was the first in nearly two decades that the US did not give standardized tests to virtually every student in public school.

Think about that.

Since 2001 almost every child took the tests unless their parents explicitly demanded they be opted out.

For 19 years almost every child in grades 3-8 and once in high school took standardized assessments.

And then came 2019-20 and – nothing.

No multiple guess fill-in the bubble questions.

No sorting students into classes based on the results.

No evaluating teachers and schools based on the poverty, race and ethnicities of the children they serve.

And all it took to make us stop was a global pandemic.

What are the results of that discontinuity?

We may never really know.

There are so many variables at play.

The Covid-19 pandemic closed school rooms across the nation for various lengths of time. Some are still closed. Some are beginning to close again.

Many classes were conducted remotely through conferencing software like Zoom and file sharing programs like Google Classroom. Others were conducted through a hybrid model combining in-person instruction and cyber instruction. While still others met in-person with numerous mitigation efforts like masks, social distancing and air purifiers.

Many students were absent, struggled to learn and experienced countless traumas due to the isolation, sickness and deaths.

About 561,000 people are dead in the United States because of Covid-19.

That’s more than Americans who died in the attack on Pear Harbor (2,403), the 9/11 terrorists attacks (3,000), WWI (116,000) or WWII (405,000).

Only the Civil War (600,000 – 850,000) has a larger death toll. For now.

As of April 1, nearly 3.47 million children have tested positive for COVID-19, most with mild symptoms, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. A few hundred have died, mostly children of color. Many more kids probably contracted the virus but were asymptomatic spreaders of the disease to adults.

As a result, between 37,000 and 43,000 children in the United States have lost at least one parent to COVID-19, according to USC research.

How do you sort through all these tragedies and traumas and say THIS was caused by a lack of standardized testing?

You probably can’t.

But you can ask questions.

For example, how many teachers really missed the data the standardized tests would have shown?

How many students and parents agonized over what last year’s test scores would have been?

How many government agencies really wanted to provide resources to schools but couldn’t figure out where they should go because they didn’t have test scores to guide them?

I’m not sure exactly how we could find answers.

We could survey teachers and staff about it.

We could survey parents and students.

We could even subpoena Congresspeople and ask them under oath if a lack of test scores determined their legislative priorities.

But we’re not really doing any of that.

It’s a prime opportunity to find out something valuable about standardized tests – mainly if people really think they’re valuable.

But we’re not going to stop and do it.

Instead we’re rushing back onto the testing treadmill this year while the Coronavirus pandemic still rages.

Is that logical behavior?

Not really.

We already have almost 20 years of data showing that annual testing did not improve student learning nationally. US kids were no better off from 2001-2019 having yearly tests than students in Scandinavia who were tested much less frequently. In fact, the countries with the highest academic achievement give far fewer assessments.

The effectiveness and fairness of standardized testing have come into question since before George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation enshrined them into law.

They were designed by eugenicists to justify racism and prejudice. Their partiality for wealthier whiter students and discrimination against poorer browner students has been demonstrated time and again.

But in 2001 we created an industry. Huge corporations write the tests, grade the tests and provide the remediation for the tests. Billions of dollars in taxes are funneled into this captive market which creates monetary incentives for our lawmakers to keep the system going.

Yes, some civil rights organizations have waffled back and forth over this as big donors who value the tests make or withhold contributions. Meanwhile, many other more grassroots civil rights organizations such as Journey for Justice Alliance (JJA), a group made up of 38 organizations of Black and Brown parents and students in 23 states, have continuously called for the abolition of high stakes testing.

It should be no surprise then that President Joe Biden – though as a candidate he promised to stop standardized testing if he were elected – did an immediate about face this year and insisted we reinstate the assessments.

A scientific mind would be empirical about this. It would examine the results as much as possible and determine whether moving forward made any sense.

This is especially true as the pandemic health crisis continues to make the act of giving the tests difficult at best and dangerous at worst.


There is no way a logical mind can look at the situation and not come to the conclusion that the status quo on testing is a triumph of capitalism over science and reason.

In a month or so, the year without testing will be just that – a single year.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill:

We shall go on to the end. We shall test during Covid, we shall test in the classes and on-line, we shall test with growing confidence and growing strength wearing masks, we shall defend our industry, whatever the cost may be. We shall test in the homes, we shall fill in bubbles on sanitized desks, we shall test in the fields and in the streets, we shall test in the hospitals; we shall never surrender!

EDUCATION

By Yuval Noah Harari – 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

Change is the only constant

Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties? A baby born today will be thirty-something in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100, and might even be an active citizen of the twenty-second century. What should we teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the world of 2050 or of the twenty-second century? What kind of skills will he or she need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them, and navigate the maze of life?

Unfortunately, since nobody knows how the world will look in 2050 – not to mention 2100 – we don’t know the answer to these questions. Of course, humans could never predict the future with accuracy. But today it is more difficult than ever before, because once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds, we can no longer be certain about anything – including things that previously seemed fixed and eternal.

A thousand years ago, in 1018, there were many things people didn’t know about the future, but they were nevertheless convinced that the basic features of human society were not going to change. If you lived in China in 1018, you knew that by 1050 the Song Empire might collapse, the Khitans might invade from the north, and plagues might kill millions. However, it was clear to you that even in 1050 most people would still work as farmers and weavers, rulers would still rely on humans to staff their armies and bureaucracies, men would still dominate women, life expectancy would still be about forty, and the human body would be exactly the same. Hence in 1018, poor Chinese parents taught their children how to plant rice or weave silk, and wealthier parents taught their boys how to read the Confucian classics, write calligraphy, or fight on horseback – and taught their girls to be modest and obedient housewives. It was obvious these skills would still be needed in 1050.

In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of the world will look in 2050. We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function, and we don’t know what gender relations will be like. Some people will probably live much longer than today, and the human body itself might undergo an unprecedented revolution thanks to bioengineering and direct brain–computer interfaces. Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.

At present, too many schools focus on cramming information. In the past this made sense, because information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. If you lived, say, in a small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it was difficult for you to know much about the wider world. There was no radio, television, daily newspapers or public libraries.1 Even if you were literate and had access to a private library, there was not much to read other than novels and religious tracts. The Spanish Empire heavily censored all texts printed locally and allowed only a dribble of vetted publications to be imported from outside.2 Much the same was true if you lived in some provincial town in Russia, India, Turkey or China. When modern schools came along, teaching every child to read and write and imparting the basic facts of geography, history and biology, they represented an immense improvement.

In contrast, in the twenty-first century we are flooded by enormous amounts of information, and even the censors don’t try to block it. Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or distracting us with irrelevancies. If you live in some provincial Mexican town and you have a smartphone, you can spend many lifetimes just reading Wikipedia, watching TED talks, and taking free online courses. No government can hope to conceal all the information it doesn’t like. On the other hand, it is alarmingly easy to inundate the public with conflicting reports and red herrings. People all over the world are but a click away from the latest accounts of the bombardment of Aleppo or of melting ice caps in the Arctic, but there are so many contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what to believe. Besides, countless other things are just a click away, making it difficult to focus, and when politics or science look too complicated it is tempting to switch to some funny cat videos, celebrity gossip, or porn.

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

In truth, this has been the ideal of Western liberal education for centuries, but up till now even many Western schools have been rather slack in fulfilling it. Teachers allowed themselves to focus on shoving data while encouraging pupils ‘to think for themselves’. Due to their fear of authoritarianism, liberal schools had a particular horror of grand narratives. They assumed that as long as we give students lots of data and a modicum of freedom, the students will create their own picture of the world, and even if this generation fails to synthesize all the data into a coherent and meaningful story of the world, there will be plenty of time to construct a good synthesis in the future. We have now run out of time. The decisions we will take in the next few decades will shape the future of life itself, and we can take these decisions based only on our present world view. If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.

The heat is on

Besides information, most schools also focus too much on providing pupils with a set of predetermined skills such as solving differential equations, writing computer code in C++, identifying chemicals in a test tube, or conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how to speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app enables you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese or Hakka, even though you only know how to say ‘Ni hao.’

So, what should we be teaching?

Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.3 More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

For as the pace of change increases, not just the economy, but the very meaning of ‘being human’ is likely to mutate. Already in 1848, the Communist Manifesto declared that ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Marx and Engels, however, were thinking mainly about social and economic structures. By 2048, physical and cognitive structures will also melt into air, or into a cloud of data bits.

In 1848 millions of people were losing their jobs on village farms, and were going to the big cities to work in factories. But upon reaching the big city, they were unlikely to change their gender or to add a sixth sense. And if they found a job in some textile factory, they could expect to remain in that profession for the rest of their working lives.

By 2048, people might have to cope with migrations to cyberspace, with fluid gender identities, and with new sensory experiences generated by computer implants. If they find both work and meaning in designing up-to-the-minute fashions for a 3-D virtual reality game, within a decade not just this particular profession, but all jobs demanding this level of artistic creation might be taken over by AI. So, at twenty-five you introduce yourself on a dating site as ‘a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop’. At thirty-five you say you are ‘a gender-non-specific person undergoing age-adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the New Cosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before’. At forty-five both dating and self-definitions are so passé. You just wait for an algorithm to find (or create) the perfect match for you. As for drawing meaning from the art of fashion design, you are so irrevocably outclassed by the algorithms, that looking at your crowning achievements from the previous decade fills you with embarrassment rather than pride. And at forty-five you still have many decades of radical change ahead of you.

Please don’t take this scenario literally. Nobody can really predict the specific changes we will witness. Any particular scenario is likely to be far from the truth. If somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then if somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it doesn’t sound like science fiction – it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics, but change itself is the only certainty.

Such profound change may well transform the basic structure of life, making discontinuity its most salient feature. From time immemorial life was divided into two complementary parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. In the first part of life you accumulated information, developed skills, constructed a world view, and built a stable identity. Even if at fifteen you spent most of your day working in the family’s rice field (rather than in a formal school), the most important thing you were doing was learning: how to cultivate rice, how to conduct negotiations with the greedy rice merchants from the big city, and how to resolve conflicts over land and water with the other villagers. In the second part of life you relied on your accumulated skills to navigate the world, earn a living, and contribute to society. Of course, even at fifty you continued to learn new things about rice, about merchants, and about conflicts, but these were just small tweaks to well-honed abilities.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, accelerating change plus longer lifespans will make this traditional model obsolete. Life will come apart at the seams, and there will be less and less continuity between different periods of life. ‘Who am I?’ will be a more urgent and complicated question than ever before.4

This is likely to involve immense levels of stress. For change is almost always stressful, and after a certain age most people just don’t like to change. When you are fifteen, your entire life is change. Your body is growing, your mind is developing, your relationships are deepening. Everything is in flux, and everything is new. You are busy inventing yourself. Most teenagers find it frightening, but at the same time, it is also exciting. New vistas are opening before you, and you have an entire world to conquer. By the time you are fifty, you don’t want change, and most people have given up on conquering the world. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. You much prefer stability. You have invested so much in your skills, your career, your identity and your world view that you don’t want to start all over again. The harder you’ve worked on building something, the more difficult it is to let go of it and make room for something new. You might still cherish new experiences and minor adjustments, but most people in their fifties aren’t ready to overhaul the deep structures of their identity and personality.

There are neurological reasons for this. Though the adult brain is more flexible and volatile than was once thought, it is still less malleable than the teenage brain. Reconnecting neurons and rewiring synapses are damned hard work.5 But in the twenty-first century, you can hardly afford stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whooooosh. Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant – not just economically, but above all socially – you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.

As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encountered before, such as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate your emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms, and the need to change your profession every decade. What is the right thing to do when confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How should you act when you are flooded by enormous amounts of information and there is absolutely no way you can absorb and analyze it all? How to live in a world where profound uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature?

To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best and feel at home with the unknown. Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the twenty-first century demands, for they themselves are the product of the old educational system.

The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour some grown-up walks in and starts talking. They are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so far, we haven’t created a viable alternative. Certainly not a saleable alternative that can be implemented in rural Mexico rather than just in upmarket California suburbs.

Hacking humans

So, the best advice I could give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world. In the past, it was a relatively safe bet to follow the adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the twenty-first century is going to be different. Due to the growing pace of change you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.

So, on what can you rely instead?  Perhaps on technology? That’s an even riskier gamble. Technology can help you a lot, but if technology gains too much power over your life, you might become a hostage to its agenda. Thousands of years ago humans invented agriculture, but this technology enriched just a tiny elite, while enslaving the majority of humans. Most people found themselves working from sunrise till sunset plucking weeds, carrying water-buckets and harvesting corn under a blazing sun. It can happen to you too.

Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life. Especially as technology gets better at understanding humans, you might increasingly find yourself serving it, instead of it serving you.

 Have you seen those zombies who roam the streets with their faces glued to their smartphones? Do you think they control the technology, or does the technology control them?

Should you rely on yourself, then? That sounds great on Sesame Street or in an old-fashioned Disney film, but in real life it doesn’t work so well. Even Disney is coming to realize it. Just like Riley Andersen, most people hardly know themselves, and when they try to ‘listen to themselves’ they easily become prey to external manipulations. The voice we hear inside our heads was never trustworthy, because it always reflected state propaganda, ideological brainwashing and commercial advertisement, not to mention biochemical bugs.

As biotechnology and machine learning improve, it will become easier to manipulate people’s deepest emotions and desires, and it will become more dangerous than ever to just follow your heart. When Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu or the government knows how to pull the strings of your heart and press the buttons of your brain, could you still tell the difference between yourself and their marketing experts?

To succeed in such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard on getting to know your operating system better. To know what you are, and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For thousands of years philosophers and prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the twenty-first century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account – they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that’s hardly half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.

The algorithms are watching you right now. They are watching where you go, what you buy, who you meet. Soon they will monitor all your steps, all your breaths, all your heartbeats. They are relying on Big Data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. And once these algorithms know you better than you know yourself, they could control and manipulate you, and you won’t be able to do much about it. You will live in the matrix, or in The Truman Show. In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it, authority will shift to them.

Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceding all authority to the algorithms and trusting them to decide things for you and for the rest of the world. If so, just relax and enjoy the ride. You don’t need to do anything about it. The algorithms will take care of everything. If, however, you want to retain some control of your personal existence and of the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.

Education

1 Wayne A. Wiegand and Donald G. Davis (eds.), Encyclopedia of Library History

(New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 432–3.

2 Verity Smith (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (London,

New York: Routledge, 2013), 142, 180.

3 Cathy N. Davidson, The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to

Prepare Students for a World in Flux (New York: Basic Books, 2017); Bernie Trilling,

21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,

2009); Charles Kivunja, ‘Teaching Students to Learn and to Work Well with 21st

Century Skills: Unpacking the Career and Life Skills Domain of the New Learning

Paradigm’, International Journal of Higher Education 4:1 (2015). For the website of

P21, see: ‘P21 Partnership for 21st Century Learning’, http://www.p21.org/our-work/

4cs-research-series, accessed 12 January 2018. For an example for the

implementation of new pedagogical methods, see, for example, the US National

Education Association’s publication: ‘Preparing 21st Century Students for a Global

Society’, NEA, http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/A-Guide-to-Four-Cs.pdf, accessed

21 January 2018.

4 Maddalaine Ansell, ‘Jobs for Life Are a Thing of the Past. Bring On Lifelong

Learning’, Guardian, 31 May 2016.

5 Erik B. Bloss et al., ‘Evidence for Reduced Experience-Dependent Dendritic Spine

Plasticity in the Aging Prefrontal Cortex’, Journal of Neuroscience 31:21 (2011):

7831–9; Miriam Matamales et al., ‘Aging-Related Dysfunction of Striatal Cholinergic

Interneurons Produces Conflict in Action Selection’, Neuron 90:2 (2016), 362–72;

Mo Costandi, ‘Does your brain produce new cells? A skeptical view of human adult

neurogenesis’, Guardian, 23 February 2012; Gianluigi Mongillo, Simon Rumpel and

Yonatan Loewenstein, ‘Intrinsic volatility of synaptic connections – a challenge to the

synaptic trace theory of memory’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology 46 (2017), 7–13.

The Myths of Standardized Testing

“You’ll never have the kind of schools you would like to have, nor the test scores you want, unless you do something about ______.”

 By David Berliner, Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University

Dr. Berliner’s notes from a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Horace Mann League, on Friday, February 15, 2019.

Thank you all for coming today. I was asked to provide about a presentations on things I think about, that might also be of interest,…. maybe even useful to you all! Feel free to ask questions any time.

I am well aware that you folks do all the hard work, while I have the luxury of being at a university, away from the actual hard work of educating our youth. But before her retirement my wife was a public-school teacher and principal,… my sister-in-law was also a school teacher and principal,…. both my son and his wife are in higher education, … and my daughter is an educational researcher. All these close family relations insure that I do not become another pointy headed academic!

The title of what I have put together for your consideration is “You’ll never have the kind of schools you would like to have nor the test scores you want unless you do something about ___X___.” I’ll relate this to testing issues, as advertised, but as I prepared I strayed a bit from the advertised topic because test scores are related to so many factors other than the effects of teachers and administrators.

First, I want to argue that the state and district environment—its care and nurturance of its citizens and educators—matters a lot. These factors dramatically affect standardized test scores and many of the achievement outcomes that we value. Let’s run a little thought experiment to illustrate this. I am going to ask you which of two states is likely to do better on the reading and mathematics NAEP tests—our nations report card. I will present data to you about these two states, state A and state B. 

OK, any predictions about the states’ score on NAEP? Anyone picking state B?

         I assume that no one here is surprised.  

Anyone here know which states these actually are?

So, my thinking is this:

You’ll never have the kind of schools and test scores you would like to have unless you do something about making your state a better place to live in,… to work in… and in which to raise children. If you just hunker down to address school issues you may be failing many of the children you care about and for whom you are responsible. In today’s America you need to fight as hard for taxes to support healthy communities, families, and schools, as you do for the paper needed by the copy machine, and for professional development days. The non-political, or a-political school administrator, must become a remnant of the past.

Really–I am not a crazy liberal activist! What I am simply stating should be obvious: A lot more time must be spent in political discourse—above and beyond your school board. This seems to me to be a necessary job requirement in contemporary times. The recent trend in which a lot of teachers ran for office, and were elected, makes it clear that I am not alone to suggest what needs to be done.

I also have data to back up what I suggest. I know, and you should too, that the richness of the environment in which we raise our children improves not just their achievement, but their IQ! Let me share one such set of data

Why did IQ—which is usually pretty stable, and rarely changes so much in a population over a mere decade—actually rise 10 points—a point a year!?

Solicit Answers. Discuss

ANS: Electricity/newspapers/strangers who were engineers/ state capitol and federal linkages with local communities/ different and more cognitively demanding kinds of jobs for adults/ etc.

My Point is this: wealthier,.. healthier,…and less parochial environments promote cognitive growth.

You need to think about all the ways your community could provide a richer environment for its kids so that their IQs and their achievement test scores can be whatever their genetic makeup promotes them to be, …You don’t want your students’ test scores to be restricted by family and neighborhood circumstances!

Does that happen? You bet it does. A number of convincing studies suggests that genes do not express nearly as much in “poor” childhood environments– environments with food insecurity, inadequate parenting, evenings spent in TV watching or computer gaming, unsuitable neighborhoods, etc. On the other hand, “rich” environments allow the full expression of one’s genetics… whether it be corn yields or the talents of our youth. It’s not that poor and rich kids necessarily have different IQs, it’s that among rich kids their genetic IQ is more likely to be expressed, whatever it is, while for poor kids, in less than ideal environments, genetic IQ is less likely to be made manifest. Your district’s standardized test scores will reflect that restriction in the expression of intelligence in many of your students’.

This suggests to me that every school administrator needs to understand that housing in their community is an educational issue not just a social issue. Housing patterns—the social environments in which our youth are raised –strongly influence the test scores your schools will display. So,…. I think that in many districts “You’ll never have the kind of schools and the kinds of test scores you might want unless you do something about your community’s housing patterns.”

It’s no secret: our children are tracked into different neighborhoods on the basis of their family’s income, ethnicity, and race. This is where many of our school problems begin. We seem deliberately blind to the fact that housing policies that promote that kind of segregation are educational policies, as well.

When we allow overwhelmingly wealthy, middle-class, and poor neighborhoods to develop, we destroy the chance for the local neighborhood school to help better all our children by bringing diverse income, racial, and ethnic groups together. If they can be brought under one roof the ordinarily beneficial middle-class educational norms are likely to dominate school culture. The cohort you go to school with influences your scores on standardized tests. The famous Coleman report—now 50 years old– showed us that schools were not as powerful as we had hoped they would be: families and neighborhoods had a powerful influence on the achievements of the kids we teach. But recent reanalyses of the Coleman report revealed that those researchers underestimated the power of the cohort with whom kids go to school. Who is in your school matters a lot, and local housing patterns have a big influence on that.

Neighborhood schools, affectionately supported in American folk beliefs as a great equalizer in the melting pot we think of as America,… now perform on school assessments almost exactly as that neighborhoods’ income predicts it will! The neighborhood school in a society with an apartheid-lite housing policy, like ours, is killing us!

In New York and Illinois, over 60 percent of black kids go to schools where 90-100 percent of the kids are nonwhite and mostly poor. In California, Texas and Rhode Island, 50 percent or more of Latino kids go to schools where 90-100 percent of the kids are also not white, and often poor. Similar statistics hold for American Indian kids. And throughout rural America there is almost always a “wrong-side-of-the-tracks” neighborhood, or a trailer park area, in which poorer people are expected to live. The kids in those neighborhoods generally go to schools with the other kids from those neighborhoods. It is properly thought of as an apartheid-lite system of housing. And the test scores that we see in those schools almost always reflect the housing patterns that exist, not the skills of teachers or the competency of the schools’ administrators.

So,… school administrators who are not heavily involved in their community’s housing policies are likely to promote, through neglect, an America most of us do not want. You all know that the percent of poverty in a school almost always informs us of that schools’ test scores. And if the test scores are used to assign letter grades for schools, as is done in some really stupid states, like my own state of Arizona, those letter grades will almost certainly be correlated with poverty. Regardless of how good the administration and teaching in a school actually is, it can be labeled a D school without anyone observing the quality of education provided in that school.

Let me share one of many examples of this high correlation of school district poverty rate, and test score data. This is Nebraska data.

High school districts in Nebraska, School poverty rate, Grade 11 reading and mathematics scores.

Poverty rate and scores on the Nebraska state tests suggest the tests need not be given since the scores are easily and accurately predicted from the poverty rates.   

Clearly school poverty rates tell us a lot about what test scores to expect. And then, in the states that are the dumbest and or the meanest, the test scores are used to determine the letter grades, as if poverty was not an issue. I can illustrate this issue using North Carolina data. Here we have the letter grades associated with percent poverty.

As I said, poverty determines your test scores and your letter grades. And it is foolish to take the bad rap for what is really a society that won’t do more to lower the rate of families in poverty.  

Data such as these makes me say again that housing is a political issue with which you need to be concerned if you care to promote democratic values. The evidence is overwhelming that the wealthier and school-smart kids loose little or nothing in tested ability when placed with poor kids who achieve less. At the same time, the poorer kids frequently do better on those tests than if they were in environments with other poor kids. Parents hate it when I present data like these, and they argue with me. But what I say is frequently true: Mixing social classes and doing away with tracking doesn’t really hurt advantaged kids, while it does advantage the kids we ordinarily think of as disadvantaged! 

Here is data that supports this claim:

Among fourth grade students:

  • For every 1 percent increase in middle-class classmates, low income students improved 0.64 percentage point in reading and 0.72 percentage point in math.
  • Any given low income student attending an 85% middle class school rather than a 45% middle class school saw “a 20 to 32 percentage point
  •  
  • David Rusk Study of Madison-Dane County, WI.int improvement in that low-income pupil’s test scores.”

Ok–even in the apartheid-lite system we have, is there some way to provide the necessary rich environments that helps kids to flourish? There sure is. It’s the promotion of high-quality early childhood programs. Thus…I say: You may never have the kind of schools and the test scores you would like to have unless you insure that low income children have access to high quality early childhood education.

What does the US look like compared to many other countries that recognize this fact?

And the richest, though not necessarily the wisest families know this:

These data made me think of Dewey, writing one hundred and fifteen years ago, in School and Society. He wrote,

 “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.”

So…. if parents who are the best educated and wealthiest want high quality preschool for their own kids, we should make such educational opportunities available for all our kids. Not to do so means that too many children of poor families will not profit as well as they might from enrollment in our public schools. Not providing high quality early education is also quite likely to hurt our always fragile democracy!

But what about the costs? What if we spent the huge amount of money necessary to have students of the poor receive high quality preschool experiences? If we did that here is what we can expect in return for that investment:

1, substantially reduced identification of these children as needing special education (that reduces school costs);

2. A much reduced achievement gap between kids in the lowest and highest social classes (that is good for democracy).

3. Reduced health problems throughout that individuals’ life (that is both humane and reduces society’s costs for health care)

4. Reduced dropout rates in high school (that has future tax savings for a community)

5. Increased high-school graduations rates (this also has future tax savings for a community)  

6. higher college attendance rates after high school (this has benefits for the local industries).

 7. Higher employment rates after high school (this increases tax revenues).

8.  Lower incarceration rates as adults (this lowers the costs to the community and state, as well as avoiding the personal tragedies for families with incarcerated relatives). And these 8 factors lead to point 9. Over 30 years high quality early education  provides a return on investment of around 10%.

So…If you live in a community with many poor kids, and you expect that community to still be around 30 years later, it is foolish, perhaps even mean spirited, not to invest in high quality early childhood education.

There is a related issue to address. It’s about what happens to low income kids, compared to high income kids, over summer.

So…. Id add this, You’ll never have the kind of schools you would like, or the test scores you desire, unless you do something about children’s summer school experiences. These should be less about the study of school subjects and more about enrichment, as often happens for the students of wealthier parents during the summer months.

Why do I add this?

Summer Learning & the Achievement Gap

K
Summer
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
Summer Reading Achievement
Trajectories
Low-Income Students
Middle-Income Students
Summer
Summer
Summer
Summer

Middle- and upper-class kids have a plethora of opportunities for leaning things in the summer that are school, as well as life related, and that also influences test scores. This wider range of experience gives them a better chance to read with greater comprehension. We know that reading comprehension, and a great deal of our understanding of social studies and science, is based on our experiences in the world in which we grow up. These experiences —on top of the formal school curriculum—make school subjects a lot easier to understand.  Here is what we know about life in contemporary America.

Clearly over the years the gap between wealthier and poorer students, in terms of their enrichment experiences while growing up— things like trips to museums, music lessons, trips to foreign countries, books purchased for them, tutors, and so forth–has grown greater and greater. This cultural and academic knowledge gap between richer and poorer students should be better attended to. It will never go away—but recognizing and addressing this issue is important.

I would add this to my message of how to improve test scores and our nation: You’ll never have the kind of schools or the test scores you would like unless you do something about absenteeism in your district. It’s really a no-brainer! If you don’t attend school you are likely not to learn what school offers. And what schools’ offer is linked (however loosely) with what is on the standardized tests, which are then used inappropriately to judge the quality of a districts’ schools and teachers. Is absence a problem? It sure is.

The first school listed here, the Morrisania school is located in the neighborhood I grew up in. Recent data showes that in this K-5 school, 85% of the kids are poor, and 42% of them have missed a month or more of schooling! If many of your kids miss a month or more of schooling, as is common all across the country, and their test scores are included in your schools’ data, you are being judged for instructional competency by means of a metric that cannot possibly be fair to you under conditions of high absenteeism. You are being judged with tests that assume the content of the tests was taught. The tests assume that students were exposed to the content. And if that is not true,…. how can you allow that to happen to yourselves? You either need to fix the absenteeism rates by devoting a lot of money to children and their families, probably by hiring many more social workers, or demand that those scores be removed from the data base that is used to judge a schools performance. Look at these data.

These data suggest that High Asian test scores and low American Indian and African American test scores may have a lot more to do with who actually shows up to school, rather than any alleged differences in ability!

Here is more on why social workers might be needed.

Finally, let me say what I expect all of you know too well: You’ll never have the kind of schools or the test scores you would like unless you do something about pay for qualified educational staff—teachers, bus drivers, counselors, librarians, nurses, social workers, and so forth.  Instead of administrators telling teachers and other staff not to strike, as was the case in Arizona and Los Angeles, they should be telling legislators and school board members that they cannot guarantee a high-quality educational experience for the children of their state with unqualified teachers and staff, and the resulting high levels of churn associated with that kind of staffing. Besides effects on achievement, teacher churn raises educational costs dramatically. The hiring of a new teacher can easily cost $15,000 per replaced teacher if replacements can be found. And in contemporary America that is harder and harder to accomplish.

Teachers leave the field for at least three reasons. Because they are not respected by politicians and newspapers, which demoralizes them; Because they burn our emotionally and physically since teaching is a lot harder than the public thinks it is; and because they do not make as much as other college grads in their states. By the way—NPR reported on Monday that Walmart truck drivers are now averaging $87,500 a year. At the same time average elementary teacher pay in the highest paying state in the union, New York, is about $80,000, and the average in my state of AZ is $44,000, half of what is earned by Arizona’s Walmart drivers.

\       

Here is a list of states that do and do not pay teachers a living wage. Remember, this is not a good wage. It is a living wage. It is what you need to survive, not thrive as a family. It’s the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs such as food, housing, and clothing. The goal of a living wage is to allow a worker to afford a basic standard of living—and 30 states will not provide their teachers that minimum level of support. Here is more on teacher pay.

That’s a gap in 2017 of $339 a week, $1,356 per month, and $16,272 a year between teachers and other college grads. And the gains in salary made by teachers in inflation adjusted dollars, from 2000 to 2017, was negative in most states. In Indiana and Colorado teachers lost about 15% of their purchasing power. In North Carolina and Michigan they lost about 12% of their purchasing power. In my state of Arizona teachers lost about 10% of their purchasing power from 2000-2017. Our governor offered a 1% pay raise! With public support teachers walked out and won a 20% pay raise over the next 3 years. The result will give them the same purchasing power they had in 2000, and will not reduce the gap in pay vis-a-vis  other college graduates. 

 And you need to know that Teach for America teachers and alternatively certified teachers, both of whom are often paid less, and employed almost exclusively in districts that are underfunded, leave teaching at the highest rates. Thus, the poorest districts incur the highest costs for recruiting teachers for their classrooms. Recent data on turnover rates inform us that,… compared with regularly certified teachers,…. alternatively certified teachers are at 44% greater risk of abandoning their classrooms during the school year. And they are 152% more likely to leave the school at which they work at the end of the school year.  Teach for America teachers also abandon their classes (and their contracts) at very high rates both within the school year, and also at the end of their first school year. Indeed, at the end of their 5th year, only about 15% of TFA recruits continue to teach in the same low-income schools to which they were originally assigned.

Further, despite their claims, Teach for America teachers are not “better” teachers for low income kids. Though they may not be worse than other new teachers, they are not as good as experienced teachers who have been through a traditional teacher education program. Districts need to pay enough to keep experienced teachers for the simplest of reasons– they are a lot better at their job!

Experience matters and churn hurts schools. If America wants better schools as well as higher tests scores, America needs to pay higher wages and run schools that are fully staffed.

So now, as an old researcher, here is what I think: 1. Using state monies to subsidize charter and private schools is really a problem for me. They not only take away monies from the public schools—about 1 billion over the last decade in Arizona–but the vast majority of them won’t admit to their schools many of the kids that need special attention. Poor kids, special ed kids, and English language learners both reduce profits and lower test scores. So these schools take public money but will not serve the public, and therefor they are a malevolent force in our democracy. 2. I am deeply unhappy about our nations’ mindless commitment to high stakes testing, when everyone in research knows that outside of school factors play 6 times more of a role in determining classroom and school test scores than do the personnel at those schools. Nevertheless, if we want our public schools to be the best they can be, and their test scores to be higher than they are, than this is what I say:

You’ll never have the kind of schools and test scores you would like to have:

  1. Unless you do something about making your state a better place to live in, to work in and in which to raise children.
  • Unless you do something about your community’s housing patterns.
  • Unless you insure that low income children have access to high quality early childhood education.
  • Unless you do something about children’s summer school experiences. These should be less about the study of school subjects and more about enrichment, as often happens for wealthier students during the summer months.
  • Unless you do something about absenteeism in your district.
  • Unless you do something about pay for qualified educational staff—teachers, bus drivers, counselors, librarians, nurses, social workers, and so forth.

The Problem with Proficiency Standards

Michael J. Petrilli / The Fordham Institute

Let’s invent a game; it’s called “Rate This School!”

Start with some facts. Our school—let’s call it Jefferson—serves a high-poverty population of middle and high school students. Eighty-nine percent of them are eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch; 100 percent are African American or Hispanic. And on the most recent state assessment, less than a third of its students were proficient in reading or math. In some grades, fewer than 10 percent were proficient as gauged by current state standards.

Rate This School
Proficiency rates are terrible measures of school effectiveness. These rates mostly reflect a school’s demographics.

That school deserves a big ole F, right?

Now let me give you a little more information. According to a rigorous Harvard evaluation, every year Jefferson students gain two and a half times as much in math and five times as much in English as the average school in New York City’s relatively high-performing charter sector. Its gains over time are on par or better than those of uber-high performing charters like KIPP Lynn and Geoffrey Canada’s Promise Academy.

Jefferson is so successful, the Harvard researchers conclude, because it has “more instructional time, a relentless focus on academic achievement, and more parent outreach” than other schools.

Now how would you rate this school? How about an A?

***

My little thought experiment makes an obvious point, one that isn’t particularly novel: Proficiency rates are terrible measures of school effectiveness. As any graduate student will tell you, those rates mostly reflect a school’s demographics. What is more telling, in terms of the impact of a school on its students’ achievement and life chances, is how much growth the school helps its charges make over the course of a school year—what accountability-guru Rich Wenning aptly calls students’ “velocity.” This is doubly so in the Common Core era, as states (like New York) move to raise the bar and ask students to show their stuff against a college- and career-readiness standard.

To be sure, proficiency rates should be reported publicly, and parents should be told whether their children are on track for college or a well-paying career. (That’s one of the great benefits of a high standard like the Common Core.) But using these rates to evaluate schools will end up mislabeling many as failures that might in fact be doing incredible work at helping their students make progress over time.

Let’s go back to Jefferson. As a middle school, it welcomes children who enter several grade levels behind. Even if these students make incredible gains in their sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade years, they still won’t be at grade level, much less “proficient,” when they sit for the state test. Furthermore, unless the state gives an assessment that is sensitive enough to detect progress—ideally a computerized adaptive instrument that allows for “out of grade level” testing—it might not give Jefferson the credit for all the progress its students are making.

Here’s the rub: There are thousands of Jeffersons out there: Schools with low proficiency rates but strong growth scores. (See figure, borrowed from this Shanker Blog post, and notice in particular the many schools whose “growth percentile” is above 50 but whose percent proficient is below 50.)

Math growth by proficiency, Shanker

This is particularly the case with middle schools and high schools, serving as they do students who might be four or five grade levels behind when they enter. Is it any surprise that middle schools and high schools are significantly more likely to be subject to interventions via the federal School Improvement Grants program? They are being punished for serving students who are coming to them way, way below grade level.

Again, none of this is particularly new or noteworthy. Others (especially reform critics) have made the same arguments countless times before. Yet an emphasis on proficiency rates over student growth is still entrenched in state and federal policy. Yes, Margaret Spellings allowed for a “growth model pilot” when she was secretary of education—but schools still had to get all students to proficiency within three years, an unrealistic standard in states with a meaningful (and rigorous) definition of proficiency. Arne Duncan has also espoused the wisdom of looking at progress over time, yet his ESEA waiver rules require state accountability systems to take proficiency rates into account—those are expected to be the drivers in identifying “focus” and “priority” schools. Nor are Democrats in Congress any better; their ESEA reauthorization bills would maintain No Child Left Behind’s reliance on “annual measurable objectives” driven by proficiency rates.

The charter sector is wedded to proficiency rates, too.  In New Orleans, for instance, the Recovery School District has shut down schools with low proficiency rates but strong individual student gains over time in the cause of boosting quality.* What it has really done, however, is closed schools worthy of replication, not extinction.

***

Have you figured out by now the true identity of our “Jefferson School”? It’s the highly-acclaimed Democracy Prep. According to the new Common Core–aligned New York test, it’s a low-proficiency-rate, high-growth school. Seth Andrew, Democracy Prep’s founder, explained to me,

Like the rest of New York, our Democracy Prep Public Schools saw dramatic drops in “proficiency rates.” In fact, we saw declines that were even greater than most. Why?

1) Entry Grade Level: Charters that enroll at the K-1 level did dramatically better than those (like Democracy Prep) who enroll in the middle school grades. This is potentially GREAT news for urban education because it means that if students don’t fall dramatically behind, they can get on grade level by grade 3, and stay on or above grade level over time. However, it is not even remotely reasonable to compare schools that randomly enroll in kindergarten to those that enroll in the sixth grade. One school has had seven years with a student while we’ve had nine months!

2) Growth Matters Most: The metric that no one has seen yet and that will be the most important to our teachers, administrators, students, and families at Democracy Prep is not “proficiency” but “value-added growth.” The reason we have operated only “A” rated schools every year since 2006 is primarily because 60 percent of that grade has been based on individual student growth, a metric on which our scholars and teachers post some of the most dramatic improvements year-over-year. In fact, even this year, our percent of “1’s” goes dramatically down in grade seven while our “2’s” go up, and by eighth grade we’ve dramatically reduced “1’s” and substantially increased “3’s and 4’s.”

My key point here is that NO ONE in this work, especially at Democracy Prep, makes so-called “miracle school claims” as reported by our critics. We believe, in fact we KNOW, that educating low-income students is incredibly hard work, compounded by the challenges of poverty, mobility, ELL status, and disability. These are not excuses; they are facts. To move our scholars from whatever grade or performance level they enter to be ready for success in the college of their choice and a life of active citizenship takes us at least five years. Given that time, our scholars consistently out-perform wealthy Westchester County on their Regents exams in nearly every subject and our first class of graduates outperformed white students on their SAT’s. Nearly 70 percent of our graduates met the NYC “aspirational performance measure” for college readiness compared to 22 percent across NYC and we require that our graduates earn an Advanced Regents Diploma because, as these new CCSS results prove, the old bar was far too low.

Is Democracy Prep an A school or an F school? The answer seems obvious to me—and should apply to any school with similar results, name brand or not, charter school or not. It’s time that policy caught up to common sense and put proficiency-rates-as-school-measures out of their misery once and for all.

* CORRECTION:  The school I had in mind is Pride College Prep; someone associated with the school had informed me that it had made strong student-level gains. But I’ve learned from Michael Stone, the Chief External Relations Officer at New Schools for New Orleans, that in fact data from CREDO showed the school’s gains to be among the weakest in the RSD. Furthermore, Michael wrote to me, “None of the charters BESE or the RSD closed would have been candidates for replication.” My apologies for the error.

Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement

reviewed by Brian D. Ray — January 10, 2014

coverTitle: Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement
Author(s): Joseph F. Murphy
Publisher: Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks
ISBN: 145220523X, Pages: 200, Year: 2012
Search for book at Amazon.com

Homeschooling in America gives insights to perhaps the most fascinating and aberrant movement of the past half-century in U.S. educational history. Murphy’s first chapter informs and engages both the newcomer and veteran regarding research-based information on the modern homeschooling movement. He properly gives definitions of homeschooling, provides statistics on the growth of the homeschooling population, and makes introductory comments on the overall state of knowledge about homeschooling. From the beginning of his book, Murphy cautions the reader with his judgment that “there is not an overabundance of solid empirical work on homeschooling,” (p. 3) and “ there is a nearly universal call for more research on homeschooling in the scholarly community, and increasingly for more sophisticated and stronger research designs” (p. 13). With these points in mind, Murphy launches into his very readable and reasonable summary of “the state of knowledge” (p. 12) in Chapters Two through Seven.

Regarding demographics, Murphy reports that homeschool families, on average, are solidly middle class, with that status relying on one wage earner, have parents who tend to be better educated than non-homeschool parents, have a high amount of marital cohesiveness among them, and are larger than the average U.S. family. The homeschool community is becoming somewhat more ethnically and racially diverse, while whites continue to be very overrepresented, and they are “overwhelmingly Christian, usually Protestant . . . tend to be socially and politically conservative, but not withdrawn from issues of the larger community in which they live” (p. 27).

Chapter Three provides a sweeping and fast-paced history of the movement and part way through the author asks, “How did homeschooling go from being on the fringe, and often a hostile venue on the fringe, to the mainstream?” (p. 37). Murphy focuses his answer on how the people involved in homeschooling created a robust, effective, and encouraging network of support groups and associations and worked for “the legalization of a practice that was on the margins of legality [in many states] only 30 years ago” (p. 39). In this chapter, as in all chapters, the author gives a succinct and useful chapter summary.

Murphy’s fourth chapter explores the “environmental conditions that foster homeschooling” and it is here that he weaves in much language and theory from some of his specialties, school improvement and leadership, education policy, and privatization (or not) of education. His sections on the social context related to homeschooling – “before homeschool (1800-1890),” “before homeschool (1890-1970),” and “homeschooling (1970 on)” are pithy and pointedly describe the competing forces of centralization and government control over children’s education versus local and/or parental control over education. Current forces supporting homeschooling are localization (decentralization, localism), more populist conceptions of democracy, “a rebalancing of the control equation in favor of lay citizens while diminishing the power of the state and educational professionals” (p. 69), the ideology of choice, and the rise of democratic professionalism in the political infrastructure of schooling and “the gradual decline of control by elite professionals” (e.g., professional managers, teacher unions).

The Calculus of Departure: Parent Motivations for Homeschooling” (Chapter Five) is a solid overview of the research and Murphy lays out a clear and parsimonious framework for understanding why parents choose homeschooling rather than institutional state or private schooling. The framework includes basic reasons most readers have probably already considered, such as those related to religion, family, school academics, and school social elements, but Murphy also includes the very important variable of parental control (rather than state or private institutional control) over a child’s rearing and, finally, the insight that there are things pushing families away from public schools and pulling them toward homeschooling

Chapter Six provides fascinating glimpses into the very wide diversity and rich array of how parents and children and local homeschool communities act out “homeschooling” on a daily and yearly basis. He allows the reader to see, in adequate detail, that curriculum materials, pedagogical approaches, social experiences, and daily educational and family practices are myriad and diverse across home-educating families.

For those who want to focus on whether homeschooling is “better,” “worse,” or “no different” for children and youth compared to institutional public or private schooling, Chapter Seven will be a key passage. Murphy addresses “the impact of homeschooling” (p. 121) on schools and school systems, on families, and on students, in terms of their academic achievement, social development, and relative success beyond secondary education. Regarding academic achievement, “… we know more than some analysts suggest we do,” “… we know a lot less than advocates of homeschooling would have us believe” (p. 140), there is a growing body of evidence that reveals homeschool students are performing above average on standardized tests, and “… there is a fair amount of suggestive evidence that homeschooling can tamp down the effects found in public schools of family socioeconomic variables” (p. 140).

 

Regarding the social development of the home educated, Murphy addresses (cf., Medlin, 2013) several hypotheses that critics of homeschooling especially promote. For example, they postulate that the home educated will be socially isolated and therefore have poor social skills; research, however, clearly shows these children are not socially isolated. Second, some hypothesize the homeschooled will have weaker self-concepts (variously defined and measured), but research shows that “home-based education appears at least as capable of nurturing self-concept as conventional schools” (p. 146). “They are generally a happy group… score about the same as conventionally schooled peers on measures of social acceptance ,” and “[overall], they demonstrate appropriate prosocial behavior and social responsibility” (p. 147). Further, research, although very limited in the number of studies to date, indicates that the long-term effects of homeschooling on its “graduates” (p. 148) are adequately positive.

 

Joseph Murphy’s creativity, systematic thinking, and ability to synthesize come through in his final chapter, “Hunches: Explanations for Positive Effects.” Again, he cautions the reader that the designs of research projects thus far notably limit what can be said about causation and “how [italics in original] homeschooling impacts student learning” (p. 154). Murphy then presents his instincts about the positive effects, and he gives a succinct and useful-to-researchers “logic model” of the “influence of homeschooling on student learning” in Figure 8.1 (p. 155).

“If there is a beginning point in the logic of action for homeschooling’s impact, it is most likely parental involvement” (p. 155) that is part of the warp and woof of homeschooling but cannot be to the same high level with institutional schooling. Second, Murphy points out, the high amounts of one-to-one instruction that homeschool students receive is good for their academic and social development and it is possible “that extensive one-to-one engagement is more important than pedagogical technique,” and might trump the educational expertise that certified teachers and professional systems might have (p. 156). He posits that the more efficient use of time and more customization in homeschooling have positive effects. Murphy mentions that a “variety of reviewers also suggest that homeschooling promotes academic and social learning by providing structures that encourage good instructional practices to flourish” (p. 158). Further, parent-led home-based education provides a safe and nourishing climate. “On the one hand, this means the development of a climate that is safe and orderly, a nonthreatening culture in which the academic work of school can unfold,” and it is also here that there “is the elimination of the negative peer culture sometimes seen in conventional schools” and instead “a supportive culture that grows from committed families and loving parents” (p. 159). Finally, the author discusses the personalization of homeschooling. Murphy deduces from research that “a positive learning environment is made possible by the nurturing relationships that seem to be more easily forged in homeschools” and homeschools “need not develop the institutional scaffolding and impersonality that define conventional schools” (p. 160). He nails down this concept with the following: “The key here is the development in homeschools of a highly personalized climate in which the child is known, cared for, and respected more deeply than is possible in models of collective schooling” (p. 160).

 

Murphy does several things well in his book that should be considered the best to date on the overall state of the homeschooling movement and theory explaining the effects of homeschooling. He does a fine job of covering nearly all the research to date on homeschooling, is generous in giving credit where it is due regarding the research done, is calm in his tone of reporting research and findings that might irritate or please historical critics or advocates of home-based education, and wraps up his book with an even-keeled, judicious, and enlightening proposed “logic of action for homeschooling’s impact” (p. 155). His theory is complementary to but an improved conceptual advancement over my (Ray, 1997, p. 85-102; 2000, p. 91-100) circumspect explanations of the positive impact of homeschooling on children, youth, and society.

Murphy will certainly annoy some (and please others) with his worldview and angle on interpreting educational/schooling history in Chapter Four on the “environmental conditions that foster homeschooling.” He points out that during the mid to late 1800s, “the key governance [over schools and education] issues were forged on the anvil of control” (pp. 55-56). One group pressed for more state schooling and more centralized control of it to implement the public school to mold citizens, give them the right knowledge, create productive workers, and create social harmony, and by 1970 public schooling was governed by a corporate bureaucratic model in a managerial state led by experts. The expansion of the “liberal democratic state brought activist government that assumed ever-expanding responsibility for social life” and “also diminished the influence of parents” (pp. 59-60). Murphy contends that homeschooling can be seen “as part of an ongoing debate about who should control the education of America’s children, government or parents” (p. 60). On this, Murphy is very correct, as many authors have explained. Murphy rightly posits that the homeschooling movement is against the liberal democratic state in that it is against “government domination of schooling and against the dominant role played by professional educators in the production known as schooling” (p. 60). Knowing the homeschool movement as intimately as I do, I think Murphy should have added to his preceding sentence “and against the production of knowledge and values that are transmitted to children and youth in places called school, whether state-controlled/public or private.”

 

I am not familiar with Joseph Murphy’s scholarship and writings but his conceptual framework seems to appear rather clearly in this same chapter. He talks about factors that account for discontent with the public sector and help “… fuel privatization initiatives such as homeschooling” (p. 61). He explains that some (he?) hold that (a) “the growth of the public sector contained the seeds of its own destruction” (p. 62), (b) “many of our social problems are in reality cratogenic—that is, created by the state” (p. 63), (c) perhaps public production (e.g., of education/schooling) is so inherently inefficient that it is worse than market failures it is supposed to correct, and (d) public employees (e.g., school teachers) are such direct beneficiaries of government spending that “they are likely to use the power of the ballot box to promote the objective of government growth” (p. 65) rather than the good of those they serve (e.g., students). One of Murphy’s points is that thinking in favor of less bureaucracy (and more grassroots), less of experts (and more of laypersons) being in charge, and less of state control (and more of parents) over individual and family life encourage and bolster the homeschooling movement. Regardless of whether the reader shares Murphy’s worldview or conceptual framework about society, economics, and schooling, he is correct about the overwhelming majority of homeschoolers thinking this way.

Homeschooling in America provides perhaps the most equable and yet insightful and engaging cohesive impression of the rising homeschooling movement (cf., Ray, 2013) proffered over the past decade. Joseph Murphy gives both an in-depth summary and evaluation of the research base on home education and offers a creative, yet reserved, theory that explains “the positive influence of homeschools on the academic and social learning of youngsters” (pp. 153-154). Every academic who studies or follows homeschooling in any nation will benefit from this treatise, and any layperson who is curious about or has an interest in parent-led home-based education will enjoy this book.

References

Medlin, R. G. (2013). Homeschooling and the question of socialization revisited. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 284-297.

Ray, B. D. (1997). Strengths of their own. Salem, OR: National Home Education Research Institute.

Ray, B. D. (2000). Home Schooling: The ameliorator of negative influences on learning? Peabody Journal of Education, 75(1&2), 71-106

Ray, B. D. (2013). Homeschooling associated with beneficial learner and societal outcomes but educators do not promote it. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 324-341.

 

 

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: January 10, 2014
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 17378, Date Accessed: 1/18/2014 6:30:26 PM

Effects of Extracurricular Participation During Middle School on Academic Motivation and Achievement at Grade 9

BY Myung Hee ImJan N. HughesQian Cao and Oi-Man Kwok

We investigated the effect of participating in two domains of extracurricular activities (sports and performance arts/clubs) in Grades 7 and 8 on Grade 9 academic motivation and letter grades, above baseline performance. Participants were 483 students (55% male; 33% Euro-American, 25% African American, and 39% Latino). Propensity score weighting controlled for potential confounders in all analyses. Delayed (Grade 8 only) and continuous participation (Grades 7 and 8) in sports predicted competence beliefs and valuing education; delayed and continuous participation in performance arts/clubs predicted teacher-rated engagement and letter grades. Benefits of participation were similar across gender and ethnicity; however, Latino youth were least likely to participate in extracurricular activities. Implications for reducing ethnic and income disparities in educational attainment are discussed.

An extensive body of research conducted over the past 25 years has documented positive associations between adolescents’ participation in school-sponsored extracurricular activities and diverse benefits, including academic success and psychosocial well-being (for reviews, see Farb & Matjasko, 2012Feldman & Matjasko, 2005). Despite a large body of research documenting benefits of participation, few studies have investigated the benefits of participating in extracurricular activities during the critical middle school years on academic outcomes (for exception, see Fredricks & Eccles, 2008). Furthermore, very few of these studies have used rigorous methods to control for the effect of differences between youth who participate and those who do not participate in extracurricular activities on variables measured prior to participation that predict both participation in extracurricular activities and outcomes. Thus, a finding of differences between participation groups may be due to these preexisting confounds rather than to participation. Drawing from bioecological theory and using propensity score analyses to control for potential confounds, the present study investigates the effects of participation in two broad domains of extracurricular activities (sports and performance arts and clubs) during middle school on academic motivation and achievement in Grade 9.

A Bioecological Perspective on Extracurricular Participation

According to the bioecological model of development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), individuals’ transactions in particular contexts across time are the proximal drivers of development. The power of proximal processes to influence development depends on the person, the context, and the timing of the transactions. In essence, bioecological models posit that the same experience or transaction may affect developmental processes differently depending on characteristics of the person, characteristics of the context, and the timing of the experience (both in terms of the person’s age and the regularity and duration of the experience). Each of these three dimensions is pertinent to understanding effects of extracurricular participation on youths’ development.

Activity Context

Youth participate in a variety of contexts (e.g., school, home, communities, neighborhoods, and peer groups) that shape their behaviors, motivation, values, competencies, and views of self and the world. Extracurricular settings are considered important contexts for development, and a youth’s transactions within these settings (e.g., interacting with peers and adult leaders, following rules and routines, setting and monitoring performance goals, and confronting and overcoming challenges) are considered proximal drivers of development (Fredricks & Simpkins, 2013).

Diverse extracurricular activities such as sports, music, and clubs share certain features that distinguish them from many of the adolescent’s other contexts. For example, extracurricular activities are often structured in ways that facilitate high-quality peer interactions and the development of prosocial friendships (Fredricks & Simpkins, 2012;Simpkins, Vest, Delgado, & Price, 2012). Additionally, youth report a greater emphasis on teamwork and social skills in extracurricular activities, relative to school and other activities, and report more opportunities for initiative, managing emotions, and identity work (Larson, Hansen, & Moneta, 2006).

In addition to differences between extracurricular activity contexts and other contexts, researchers have suggested that different types of activities, such as sports versus music or arts, offer different experiences that may account for differential effects on development (Denault & Poulin, 2009aFredricks & Eccles, 2008). For example, in a large sample of 11th graders, students reported experiencing more opportunities for initiative (perseverance and goal achievement), emotional regulation, and teamwork in sports than in other extracurricular activities but fewer opportunities for identity work, positive peer relationships, and experiences that build social capital and prepare youth for college (Larson et al., 2006).

Consistent with a finding of differences in developmental experiences across different activity contexts, researchers have found differences in outcomes associated with participation in sport and non-sport (e.g., academic clubs or performing arts) activities. Specifically, participation in performing arts (e.g., theater, choir, and band) and academic and service clubs is more consistently related to higher grades and academic values than is participation in sports (Denault & Poulin, 2009aFredricks & Eccles, 2008). Conversely, participation in sports may be more consistently related to a higher sense of school belonging and closer social ties among students, parents, and schools than is participation in non-sport activities (Broh, 2002Villarreal, 2013). Sports participation but not participation in performing arts/clubs has also been associated with higher levels of alcohol use and other risky behavior (Eccles & Barber, 1999Fredricks & Eccles, 2008). These finding may be due to differences in peer group experiences in sports and non-sport activities. For example, Denault and Poulin (2009b) found that boys with behavior problems are more likely to self-select into sport activities than non-sport activities.

Activity Timing

Bioecological theory assumes that the timing of transactions within and across contexts is important. Those transactions that occur more regularly and for a longer period of time have a greater influence of development. Extracurricular activities typically involve regular and frequent participation, which may account, in part, for their effects on development. The current study focuses on the duration of participation. Specifically, duration in the current study refers to the number of years a youth participates in an extracurricular activity. More years of participation is expected to yield more benefits than fewer years due to the time it takes to build meaningful social ties with peers and adult leaders and the skills necessary to perform well. In a review of studies on participation duration, Bohnert, Fredricks, and Randall (2010) concluded that participation for two years yields more benefits than participation for one year and that additional years of participation beyond two may provide further benefits. Importantly, there is a dearth of studies examining effects of consistency or stability of participation. Beginning involvement in an activity one year and not continuing it the following year may signal negative experiences in that activity, which could negatively impact students’ liking for and engagement in school. Based on this reasoning, one might expect that students who participate in one year but discontinue participation the second year (discontinued group) would gain fewer benefits from participation than students who do not begin participation until the second year (delayed start group) even though both groups of students participated for an equivalent period of time.

Person Variables

Person variables refer to characteristics such as age, gender, and ethnicity as well as individual differences in physical appearance, mental and emotional resources, and motivation. With respect to age, the same experience may have different developmental impacts at different ages. Although the majority of research on extracurricular participation has occurred at the high school level, the effects of participation may be particularly strong in middle school, when young adolescents are undergoing rapid biological, cognitive, and social changes. For example, early adolescence is a time of increased susceptibility to the influence of one’s peers and an increased desire for autonomy from parents (Brown & Larson, 2009).

The middle school years are of critical importance to students’ long-term academic attainment (Alexander, Entwisle, & Kabbani, 2001). The normative decline in students’ academic motivation and achievement at the transition to middle school has been explained by a lack of fit between the developmental needs of the youth adolescent and the capacity of the school to meet those needs (Eccles, Wigfield, Midgley, & Reuman, 1993). The transition often brings larger and complex peer ecology, a departmentalized curriculum, and less support from teachers (Eccles & Roeser, 2009). In the face of these challenges, many students disengage from school during the middle school years. The present study aims to understand the effect of extracurricular participation during this period among an ethnically diverse, predominantly low socioeconomic status (SES) sample of youth who entered first grade with low literacy skills. Low literacy skills in first grade are one of the strongest predictors of subsequent academic failure (Sonnenschein, Stapleton, & Benson, 2010).

Research on individual characteristics associated with benefit from extracurricular participation has been restricted primarily to gender and ethnicity. Although boys and girls are equally likely to participate in extracurricular activities, boys are more likely to participate in sports, whereas girls are more likely to participate in performance and fine arts (Denault & Poulin, 2009bEccles & Barber, 1999Fredricks & Eccles, 2008). Furthermore, different factors may predict participation for boys and girls (Denault & Poulin, 2009bFeldman & Matjasko, 2007). Despite gender differences in predictors and activity contexts, the effects of extracurricular participation are generally similar across gender, with gender moderation inconsistently found (Fredricks & Eccles, 2006,2008).

With respect to ethnicity, researchers have found that Latino/Hispanic students are less likely to participate in extracurricular activities than are other ethnic groups (Lugaila, 2003National Center for Education Statistics, 2012Ream & Rumberger, 2008). Using a national data set, Feldman and Matjasko (2007) reported that of youth in Grades 7 through 12, 36.7% of Latino students did not participate in any extracurricular activity, compared to 21.0% of White/Euro-American students and 25.6% of African American students. Scholars have suggested that the lower levels of participation among Latino youth may be a result of language barriers, a lack of parental awareness of the benefits of participation, and Latino cultural values of duty to the family, which may require youth to be wage earners or help with other family obligations (Peguero, 2010Shannon, 2006).

Comparative studies find that all ethnic groups benefit from extracurricular participation, even after adjusting for multiple self-selection factors (Marsh & Kleitman, 2002). The few comparative studies of multiethnic samples of youth report that Latino students benefit more from participation than do African American or Euro-American students (Hull, Kilbourne, Reece, & Husanini, 2008Villarreal, 2013). For example, using data from a large school district in Oregon, Towe (2012) found a stronger association between extracurricular participation and GPA for Latino than for non-Latino students. Some authors have suggested that extracurricular participation is especially beneficial to Latino students because it fosters social integration at school, thereby increasing access to non-Latino sources of social capital (Ream & Rumberger, 2008Simpkins, O’Donnell, Delgado, & Becnel, 2011).

Selection Effects

In addition to the aforementioned substantive gaps in the literature on effects of extracurricular participation, prior studies have not adequately controlled for potential confounds that may account for an association between extracurricular participation and outcomes. Despite an extensive body of research documenting associations between extracurricular participation and academic motivation and achievement, the fact that students choose to participate, or not, in these activities poses a serious obstacle to reaching conclusions regarding a causal role for participation. The crux of the problem is that students are not randomly assigned to participation; rather, students select (or are recruited into) these activities. Furthermore, many students, family, and school variables that are associated with selection into participation versus nonparticipation are also associated with the measured outcomes. For example, student demographic variables (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status) and individual characteristics (e.g., interests, competencies, social and behavioral adjustment, academic achievement), family variables (e.g., parent involvement in school and encouragement for participation), and school factors (e.g., size, availability of opportunities) predict whether students participate or not in extracurricular activities as well as the type and intensity of participation (Denault & Poulin, 2009bFeldman & Matjasko, 2007).

Due to potential selection effects, a finding that participants and nonparticipants differ at some future point on outcomes of interest may tell us little about the effect of participation on these outcomes. A few researchers investigating effects of extracurricular participation on development have employed a number of strategies for minimizing selection effects. The most common strategy is the use of covariate analyses in which the effects of a limited number of confounding variables are statistically controlled (Broh, 2002Fredricks & Eccles, 2006Gardner, Roth, & Brooks-Gunn, 2008). However, these statistical adjustments can employ only a limited number of observed covariates that may not capture all of the preexisting differences between participants and nonparticipants. Additionally, these statistical adjustments make a number of critical assumptions about the relationship between the covariates and the outcomes across the groups of interest that are rarely tested (Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002).

Prior reviews of the literature on extracurricular participation reflect a consensus that improved methods to minimize threat differences between participation groups prior to participation are needed to move the field forward. In 2005, Feldman and Matjasko concluded that “it is necessary to reduce selection bias to gauge participation’s true impact” (p. 202). In their 2012 review, Farb and Matjasko noted that despite repeated calls for better controls for selection bias, “there has not been any movement in this direction” since 2005 (p. 45).

Propensity Score Analysis

Increasingly, social science researchers have employed propensity scores to minimize selection effects in nonexperimental studies. A propensity score is defined as the conditional probability of assignment to a particular “treatment” given a vector of observed covariates (Rosenbaum & Rubin, 1984). Propensity score analysis generates a single index—the propensity score—that summarizes information across potential confounds. Procedures such as matching and weighting can then be used to equate the participant and nonparticipant students on their propensity scores (West et al., 2014). To the degree that equating is achieved on all potential confounders, the propensity score analysis produces an unbiased estimate of the average effect of participation on students. Although one can never be certain that all potential confounders are equated, or balanced, across groups, use of a broad set of covariates known to be associated with the treatment and the outcome minimizes this risk (West et al., 2014). To the authors’ best knowledge, no study has employed propensity score analyses in estimating the effect of extracurricular participation on academic outcomes.

Study Purpose and Research Hypotheses

Given the aforementioned limitations of prior research on effects of extracurricular participation on academic functioning, the present study investigated the role of activity context, duration of participation, and the youth’s gender and ethnicity on effects of participation in extracurricular activities during the middle school grades on academic motivation and achievement. Specifically, the current study investigated the effects of timing of participation across Grades 7 and 8 (i.e., continuous, delayed, discontinued, and no participation) in two broad activity contexts (sports and performance arts/clubs) on students’ Grade 9 academic outcomes, above baseline performance on these outcomes. The potential moderating roles of two person variables, gender and ethnicity, were also investigated.

Based on research suggesting that different activity contexts may influence different aspects of academic motivation and achievement (Blomfield & Barber, 2010Denault, Poulin, & Pedersen, 2009), we assessed four distinct but related outcomes. Specifically, academic competence beliefs and subjective valuing of academic achievement were selected as outcomes based on extensive evidence of their association with academic effort and attainment (Wigfield, Cambria, & Eccles, 2012). Students’ course grades and teacher-rated behavioral engagement were selected as outcomes based on the strong association between these outcomes at Grade 9 and successful completion of high school and enrollment in postsecondary education (Donegan, 2008Janosz, Archambault, Morizot, & Pagani, 2008). Importantly, propensity score analysis was employed to strengthen the basis for reaching causal conclusions regarding effects of extracurricular participation on subsequent academic motivation and achievement.

Based on theory and empirical findings discussed previously, we expected boys would participate at a higher rate than girls in sports but that girls would participate at a higher rate than boys in performance arts/clubs. We expected Latino students to participate in both activity domains at a lower rate than African American or Euro-American youth. Relative to students who did not participate in extracurricular activities in Grades 7 or 8 (nonparticipants), we expected students who participated in Grades 7 and 8 (continuous participants) and students who participated in Grade 8 only (delayed participants) would perform better on Grade 9 outcomes. However, we expected students who participated only in Grade 7 (discontinued participants) in either activity domain would not differ from nonparticipants on Grade 9 outcomes.

With respect to activity context, based on the evidence that participation in performance arts (e.g., band and chorus) and academic clubs is more consistently predictive of academic performance than is sport participation, we expected participation in performing arts/clubs would predict teacher-awarded letter grades and teacher-rated engagement. Based on the reasoning that all school-sponsored activities provide a sense of belonging to school and valuing of school, we expected both activity contexts would predict academic competence beliefs and educational values. With respect to gender and ethnic moderation of participation effects, we expected girls and boys would benefit similarly from participation and that Latino students would benefit more from participation than Euro-American or African American students.

These research questions were pursued with a predominantly low-income sample of youth who were recruited into the current longitudinal study on the basis of academic risk (see Participants section). Although lower achieving and low SES youth are less likely to participate in extracurricular activities, they may be more likely to benefit from participation. For example, participation in extracurricular activities in middle and high school reduced the probability of dropping out of school only for students with low academic and social competence in middle school (Mahoney & Cairns, 1997). A finding of an effect of participation on these outcomes would suggest that increasing participation in middle school is a viable strategy for increasing the educational attainment of students with elevated risk for school failure.

Methods

Overview

Data on students’ extracurricular participation was obtained in interviews when students were in Grades 7 and 8. We selected these grades because a wide range of extracurricular activities, including sports, performance arts, and service and academic clubs, were available at these grades on each school campus. Outcomes were assessed at baseline (Year 5 in the longitudinal study, when students were in Grades 4 or 5) and Grade 9. A difference in the grade at which the baseline measure was administered is due to the fact that some students repeated an elementary grade (n = 156, 31.5%). For teacher-rated engagement and reading and math achievement, the same outcome measure was used at baseline (Grades 4 or 5) and Grade 9. For teacher-awarded letter grades (which were typically provided by the language arts teacher), the baseline measure was the score on a measure of reading achievement. As described in the following measures section, developmentally appropriate measures of student-perceived academic competence and valuing of education were used at Grade 9 and baseline. Different sources reported on different outcomes: Students reported on their academic competence beliefs and valuing of education, teachers reported on students’ letter grades, and reading achievement was assessed on an individually administered test. Bilingual students were interviewed and tested in the language in which they were more proficient, based on scores on the Woodcock-Muñoz Language Test (Woodcock & Muñoz-Sandoval, 1993), by bilingual examiners.

Participants

Participants were 483 students recruited in the fall of 2000 or 2001 into a larger longitudinal study (N = 784) when they were in Grade 1. Data on participation in extracurricular were collected when these students were in Grades 7 and 8 (i.e., years 2007–2009).

Students in the larger longitudinal sample were enrolled in one of three school districts (one urban and two small city districts) in Texas and were selected into the study on the basis of scoring below the median on a district-administered test of literacy administered in the spring of kindergarten or the fall of Grade 1. Based on school records, School District A (student population = 13,558) had an ethnic distribution of 38% White/Euro-American, 37% Latino/Hispanic, 25% African American, and less than 1% other. District B (student population = 24,429) had an ethnic distribution of 35% White/Euro-American, 30% Latino/Hispanic, 30% African American, and 5% other. District C (student population = 7,424) had an ethnic distribution of 67% White/Euro-American, 12% Latino/Hispanic, 12% African American, and 9% other. Additional inclusionary criteria for the larger study included speaking English or Spanish, not receiving special education services other than speech and language services, and not having been previously retained in Grade 1. Of the 1,374 children eligible to participate in the longitudinal study, written parent consent for participation for 5 years was received for 784 (65%). Students with and without consent did not differ on a broad array of variables. Details on recruitment are reported in Hughes, Luo, Kwok, and Loyd (2008).

At the end of the first five years of participation in the study, parental consent for continued participation was received for 569 of the 784 participants. Almost all nonconsent was due to nonresponse. Attrition analyses found no differences between participants and nonparticipants on a wide range of variables assessed when students were in first grade, including gender, parent education level, literacy scores, reading and math achievement, IQ, ethnicity, and bilingual status. Participants (54.7% male) were 12.56 years of age (SD = .37) at Grade 7, 65.9% were economically disadvantaged based on income eligibility for free or reduced lunch, and 41.5% of parents’ highest level of educational attainment was a high school diploma or less. The ethnic composition of the sample was 33.1% Euro-American, 25.3% African American, 38.5% Latino/Hispanic (of whom 32.0% were enrolled in bilingual education at Grade 5), and 3.1% Other. Participants were enrolled in 64 schools during Grade 7 and 72 schools in Grade 9. The increase in the number of schools reflects the increased geographical dispersal of the sample over time. At Grade 7, participants’ mean reading age-standard scores from the Woodcock-Johnson III (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001) or its Spanish-language equivalent (Batería III Woodcock-Munoz; Woodcock, Muñoz-Sandoval, McGrew, Mather, & Schrank, 2004) was 96.44 (SD = 14.13).

Measures

Extracurricular Participation

In individual interviews at school, the interviewer asked students to indicate if they participated that year in each of four activity contexts: (a) sports; (b) performance arts, fine arts, or music; (c) academic clubs; and (d) other school activities such as student council, newspaper, or service activities. For each activity category, students were given examples of activities that fit that category (e.g., examples of sports activities included football, baseball, cheerleading, pep squad, and tennis). Students were asked to name the specific activity in which they engaged, and their answers were written verbatim. Verbatim responses were coded into activity domain by two graduate assistants, whose agreement was 98%. Students were asked to report only activities that were sponsored by the school and not part of the regular school day. Thus, if students were in a drama class but did not participate in drama activities outside class time (e.g., practices or performances after school hours), that activity was not counted. Based on the relatively small number of students participating in academic clubs and other school activities such as student council and prior research finding similar profiles of participants across these activities (Feldman & Matjasko, 2007), these activities were combined with performance arts and music into a performance arts/clubs category. Although data on intensity of participation were collected, for the present study, participation in each broad activity category (sports and performance arts/clubs) was defined as a dichotomous variable.

Four different duration patterns in participation across two consecutive grades (i.e., Grades 7 and 8) were possible: (1) continuous: students participated for both years; (2) discontinued: students participated only in Grade 7; (3) delayed: students participated only in Grade 8; and (4) nonparticipation: student did not participate in either year. Nonparticipants were the reference group for the three contrasts.

Competence Beliefs and Valuing of Educational Attainment

At Grade 9, students completed the 11-item Academic Competence and Effort Beliefs Scale (α = .89) and the 10-item Value of Education Scale of the Motivation for Education Attainment Questionnaire (α = .85) (masked), a multidimensional measure of motivation to complete high school and pursue postsecondary education. Example Academic Competence and Effort Beliefs items include “I am on track to graduate from high school” and “Nothing will get in the way of my going to college.” Example Value of Education items include “If I work hard in school, I will get a better job than the kids who don’t try hard” and “School is not that important for future success” (reverse scored). The scale has demonstrated good construct and criterion-related validity in an at-risk sample of Grade 9 students (Cham, West, Hughes, and Im, 2015).

At baseline, students’ academic competence beliefs and educational values were assessed with the Competence Beliefs and Subjective Task Values Questionnaire (Wigfield et al., 1997). Five items assess competence beliefs in each subject (i.e., reading and math). Specifically, children were asked how good they were in that subject, how good they were relative to the other things they do, how good they were relative to other children, how well they expected to do in the future in that subject, and how good they thought they would be at learning something new in that subject. Students indicated their response to each item by pointing to a thermometer numbered 1 to 30. The endpoint and midpoint of each scale was labeled with a verbal descriptor of the meaning of that scale (e.g., with 1 indicating not at all good, 15 indicating ok, and 30 indicating one of the best). Children rated their subjective valuing of reading and math by indicating how interesting/fun each subject was, how important they thought being good in each subject was compared to other activities, and how useful they thought each subject was using a similar 1 to 30 scale. Wigfield et al. (1997) reported that children’s reports on this measure were moderately correlated with teacher and parent report of competencies for children as young as third grade. Based on moderate correlations between reading and math competency scores (r = .30) and reading and math subjective valuing scores (r = .54), a mean academic competence beliefs score and a mean academic valuing score were computed for reading and math.

Letter Grades

Students’ language arts teachers were asked to report the letter grade (from A to F, with A = 4 and F = 0) that the student received in his or her class for the most recent grading period. Language arts was selected because all students take language arts in Grade 9. In a few cases (7%), when a language arts teacher was not available to report on students’ grades, another teacher who knew the student well reported on the student’s grades in his or her class.

Teacher-Rated Classroom Engagement

The same teacher who reported on students’ grades also rated students’ classroom engagement using an 11-item questionnaire adapted from Skinner, Zimmer-Gembeck, and Connell (1998). Items assess effort, persistence, concentration, and interest. Example items include: “tries hard to do well in school,” “participates in class discussion,” “pays attention in class,” and “just wants to learn only what he/she has to in school” (reverse scored). Teachers were asked to indicate the extent to which each statement was true on a 1 (not true at all) to 4 (very true) scale. The scale demonstrates good factorial validity (masked) and internal consistency (α at baseline and Grade 9 was .92 and .91, respectively).

Reading Achievement

The Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement (WJ-III; Woodcock et al., 2001) is an individually administered measure of academic achievement for individuals ages 2 to adulthood. The WJ-III Broad Reading W Scores, which are based on the Letter-Word Identification, Reading Fluency, and Passage Comprehension subtests, were used. Extensive studies document the reliability and construct validity of the WJ-III (Woodcock et al., 2001). Spanish language–dominant children were administered the Batería III, the equivalent Spanish version of the WJ-III (Woodcock et al., 2004), by bilingual examiners.

Covariates for Propensity Score Analysis

A total of 44 covariates (potential confounders), all of which were measured in Grades 4 or 5, prior to opportunity to participate in middle school activities, were used to estimate the propensity scores of students who did and did not participate in extracurricular activities (see propensity score estimation under Study 1 and Study 2 in the following). These 44 covariates (listed in Table 1) were selected to be as comprehensive as possible, including variables that have been shown in prior research to be associated with extracurricular participation and with measures of academic motivation and achievement. These variables were assessed with direct child testing and interviews (e.g., measures of language proficiency, academic achievement, perceived teacher-student support, perceived competence beliefs in reading and math, value of reading and math, and perceived social acceptance), teacher questionnaires (e.g., behavioral, academic, and social functioning), parent questionnaires (e.g., family demographics, educational aspirations, and child behavioral and social functioning), and school records (e.g., child ethnicity, age, gender, and bilingual class placement).

Table 1

List of Covariates for Propensity Score Analyses

Data Analytic Procedure

Propensity Score Analysis

As discussed in the introduction, the first step in propensity score analysis is to estimate each student’s propensity score for each participation category (i.e., conditional probability of being in each participation category) given the student’s scores on the covariates. The second step is to equate the estimated propensity scores’ distributions between the participants and nonparticipants. The third step is to check the balance of the distributions of the set of 44 covariates between the participating and nonparticipating students. Each step is described in greater detail in the following.

Estimation

We estimated two propensity scores depending on two activity domains, sports and performance arts/clubs. The propensity score for the sports was the probability of a student’s participating in sports in Grade 7 versus not participating in sports. The propensity score for the performance arts/club activity was the probability of a student participating in performance arts/clubs in Grade 7 versus not participating in performance arts/clubs in Grade 7.

To estimate propensity scores, we used the random forests method (Breiman, 2001) under the R package version 3.1.0 (Strobl, Boulesteix, Kneib, Augustin, & Zeileis, 2008). According to previous studies (Lee, Lessler, & Stuart, 2010), the random forests method reduces bias in the estimate of the effect of a treatment (i.e., extracurricular participation) on outcomes by identifying complex and nonlinear relationships of covariates with students’ participation status.

Equating

With the estimated propensity score, we employed weighting approach using the odds method (Hirano, Imbens, & Ridder, 2003) under R package. In this method, each student who belonged to a particular participation category was given a weight of 1.00, whereas nonparticipants were given a weight of Formula , where Formula is the nonparticipating student’s estimated propensity score. This weighting procedure reflects survey sampling weighting procedures to estimate parameters and their associated standard errors (Asparouhov, 2005). With this weighting by the odds method, one can estimate the effect of activity participation for students who did not actually participate compared to closely equated students who participated (Schafer & Kang, 2008).

Covariates Distribution Balance

To evaluate the effectiveness of the propensity score equating procedure, we checked the balance of the distributions of the completely observed values of the covariates across participants’ groups and the missing data pattern of the covariates between the participating and nonparticipating students (Rosenbaum & Rubin, 1984). Specifically, using the weighted propensity scores, we calculated the absolute standardized mean difference (SMD) of the 44 covariates between participation groups (Rubin, 2001;Stuart, 2010). An SMD score of 0 indicates perfect balance (i.e., no difference in SMD).

Effect of Extracurricular Participation on Students’ Outcomes

Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was employed to examine the hypothesized model using Mplus version 7.2 (Muthén & Muthén, 1998–2014). We used students’ weighted propensity scores with WEIGHT function. In data analysis, we calculated intraclass correlation (ICC) for school since school characteristics such as size is associated with participation (Feldman & Matjasko, 2007) to determine the necessity of accounting for the data dependency. We then used TYPE=COMPLEX in combination with the CLUSTER function (i.e., school at Grade 9) to take into account the data dependency (i.e., students nested within schools).

The effects of duration (timing) of extracurricular participation by activity domain in Grades 7 and 8 were estimated separately for each of the four Grade 9 academic outcomes (competence beliefs, valuing of education, teacher-rated engagement, and teacher-awarded letter grades), controlling for prior performance on the outcomes. Tests of the effects of sport duration on outcomes used students’ weighted propensity score for participating in sports in Grade 7. Tests of the effects of performance arts/clubs’ duration used students’ weighted propensity score for participating in performance arts/clubs in Grade 7. We created four categories representing groups with different duration patterns: continuous, delayed, discontinued, and nonparticipation. We then created the three dummy variables (i.e., continuous, delayed, and discontinued), using the nonparticipation group as the reference group (see Measures section for more details), which was assigned a value of 0. Each of the other groups was given a value of 1 on the dummy variable that contrasted it with the reference group in the analysis and a value of 0 on the other dummy variables. With this dummy variable coding approach, effects can be directly interpreted as differences in effects of each pattern of duration (i.e., continuous, delayed, and discontinued participation) relative to effect of the reference group (i.e., nonparticipation) in that domain. For example, the effect of continuous participation equals the effect of continuous participation minus the effect of no participation. When more than one participation pattern had a significant effect on an outcome, we then conducted post hoc tests to determine if one pattern had a stronger effect than another pattern. For the post hoc tests, we used the Wald test.

We first allowed the relation to vary between the two effects and each outcome separately. Next, we imposed equality constraints on these relations. Next, using multiple group analysis, we investigated whether student’s gender (boys and girls) or ethnicity (Euro-American, African American, and Latino students) moderated the effects of different duration pattern and Grade 9 outcomes.

Results

Descriptive Statistics

Table 2 presents the number and percentage of students participating in each broad activity domain for Grades 7 and 8 and the number of students in each duration pattern, separately by gender and ethnicity. Table 3 presents descriptive statistics for the outcomes in the hypothesized models. The variables were screened for non-normality and extreme values. None of the variables used in the analyses exhibited levels of skewness or kurtosis associated with problematic tests of fit or standard errors (West, Finch, & Curran, 1995). Each baseline score measured at Year 5 was predictive of the corresponding outcome at Grade 9 (range, .15–.29). All outcomes were positively correlated with each other. The associations between education belief and academic competence belief and between teacher-rated engagement and letter grade were strong (.52 and .65, respectively).

Table 2

Frequency of Extracurricular Participation Status by Gender and Ethnicity (N = 483)

Table 3

Correlations and Descriptive Statistics for Outcomes at Grade 9 and Baseline Variables of Outcomes at Grade 5 (N = 483)

Covariates Balance Across Participating and Nonparticipating Groups

The selected covariates cover a broad range of dimensions (demographics, performance, behavior, motivation, social, personality, parent involvement, and home-school relationship) and sources (archival, performance, student report, parent report, and teacher report). Figure 1 shows the balance measures before and after weighting the sample. After weighting by the odds method together with the random forests propensity scores, the balance improved the distributions of propensity scores and the distributions of the observed values of the covariates between the participating and nonparticipating students. Furthermore, after propensity score equating, the covariates had lower standard mean differences. Specifically, SMDs of covariates selected on the basis of high correlations with the outcomes ranged from 0 to 0.23, indicating good balance (Ho, Imai, King, & Stuart, 2007). Additional details on covariate balance are available from the corresponding author. We concluded that the weighting procedure successfully equated the participating and nonparticipating students on the set of 44 covariates measured in or prior to Year 5 (before any student had begun middle school).

Figure 1.

The boxplots of propensity scores between participation and nonparticipation students before and after propensity score equating using the weighted odds method. parti = participation group; non-parti = nonparticipating group.

Gender and Ethnic Differences in Participation

In responding to our first hypothesis, we tested gender and ethnic differences in participation in sports and performance arts/clubs as well as in nonparticipation at either Grade 7 or Grade 8. Because results were similar across grades in terms of direction and magnitude, findings only for Grade 8 only are detailed here.

Gender Differences

As expected, girls were less likely to participate in sports than boys (z-ratio = −2.78, p = .006) but were more likely than boys to participate in performance art/clubs (z-ratio= 2.71, p = .007). Although boys and girls differed in what activity they selected, they did not differ in whether they were involved in any extracurricular activities or not.

Ethnic Differences

Also as expected, Latino students were less likely than African American (z-ratio = −2.14, p = .032) or Euro-American (z-ratio = −3.16, p = .002) students to participate in sports. African American and Euro-Americans did not differ in their rate of participation in sports. In the domain of performance arts/clubs, Latino students were less likely to participate than Euro-American students (z-ratio = −2.12, p = .034), whose participation was similar to that of African Americans. When considering ethnic differences in status as participating or not in any extracurricular activity, Latino were less likely to participate than African American (z-ratio = −2.07, p = .038) or Euro-American youth (z-ratio = −3.68, p < .001), who did not differ from each other.

Effect of Duration of Participation on Outcomes

First, at the school level we calculated the intraclass correlation for each Grade 9 outcome. The ICCs for competence belief, valuing of education, teacher-rated classroom engagement, and teacher-awarded letter grade were .07, .00, .03, and .04, respectively. Thus, all analyses took into account the nonindependent data structure (i.e., students nested within schools).

We then tested the effect of the different duration patterns across Grades 7 and 8 on outcomes at Grade 9, separately by the activity domain (i.e., sports or performance arts/clubs). The hypothesized ANCOVA models we examined with Mplus are the saturated path models (with degrees of freedom of zero) in the structural equation modeling (SEM) framework. Therefore, we do not report the fit indices due to perfect fit for all models in the study. Table 4 shows the standardized parameter estimates, corresponding standard error, and p value for each effect. Given that the reference group was the nonparticipation group, effects can be directly interpreted as differences in effects of each pattern of duration (i.e., continuous, delayed, and discontinued participation) relative to nonparticipation in that domain. Results for duration patterns will be presented separately for each activity category.

Table 4

Standardized Effect of Different Pattern of Duration by Activity Type During Middle School (Grades7 and 8) on Grade 9 Outcomes

Continuous participation in sports had a significant positive effect on Grade 9 academic competence beliefs (β = .14, SE = .04, p < .001) and valuing of education (β = .16, SE = .05, p = .003). A significant positive effect of delayed sports participation was found only for Grade 9 valuing of education (β = .15, SE = .05, p = .004). Finally, we found no effect of discontinued participation in sports relative to no participation.

Turning to performance arts/clubs, continuous participation had a significant positive effect on Grade 9 competence belief (β = .17, SE = .03, p < .001), teacher-rated classroom engagement (β = .21, SE = .05, p < .001), and teacher-awarded letter grades (β = .16, SE = .04, p < .001). Results of delayed performance arts/clubs’ participation parallel those for continuous participation, with effects found for Grade 9 competence belief (β = .10, SE = .04, p = .019), teacher-rated classroom engagement (β = .10, SE = .04, p = .020), and teacher-awarded letter grades (β = .06, SE = .03, p = .020). A significant positive effect was found for discontinued participation in performance arts/clubs relative to no participation in performance arts/clubs on academic competence beliefs only (β = .09, SE = .04, p = .040).

Gender and Ethnic Moderation of Effect of Duration Patterns

Using multiple group analysis, in separate analyses we tested the potential gender and ethnic moderating effects in the relation between the pattern of duration of participation and each Grade 9 outcome. We first allowed the relations between each pattern of participation and outcomes to vary across student gender and ethnicity (i.e., relaxed model) and then imposed equality constraints on these relations (i.e., constrained model), sequentially. We compared the two competing nested models (i.e., relaxed vs. constrained) at the significance of α ≤ .05 using Wald tests. The null hypothesis of the Wald test is that the constrained model (indicating no moderation effect) fits the data equally well as the relaxed model (indicating the existence of moderation effect). We tested all possible comparisons between groups (i.e., male vs. female for testing gender moderation; Euro-American vs. Latino; Euro-American vs. African American; Latino vs. African American for testing ethnicity moderation) on each outcome in two activity domains. Additional details on the results of Wald tests for testing gender and ethnicity moderation effect of duration patterns of participation on each of grade 9 outcomes are available from the corresponding author.

Gender moderation

According to Wald tests (with degrees of freedom of one for all Wald tests), one significant gender moderation effect in sport (χ2 = 5.68, p = .017 for valuing of education) of the 12 tests and two significant gender moderation effects in performance arts/clubs (for teacher-rated classroom engagement, χ2 = 12.10, p < .001; for teacher-awarded letter grade, χ2 = 3.97, p = .046) of the 12 tests were found. Specifically, in sports, the effect of discontinued participation on valuing of education was positively significant only for girls (β = .16, SE = .08, p = .040). In performance arts/clubs, for teacher-rated classroom engagement, the effect of discontinued participation was positively significant only for boys (β = .12, SE = .03, p < .001). For teacher-awarded letter grades, the effect of delayed participation was positively significant only for boys (β = .18, SE = .07, p = .007).

Ethnic moderation

For ethnic moderation analyses, we tested 36 pairwise comparisons (4 outcomes × 3 pairwise among three ethnic groups × 3 duration patterns) in each activity domain. Based on Wald tests for testing ethnic moderation effect, one significant effect in sport (for teacher-awarded letter grades χ2 = 10.76, p = .001) of the 36 tests and eight significant effects in performance arts/clubs (for simple presentation, these results of Wald tests were not reported here) of the 36 tests were found.

Turning to performance arts/clubs, for competence belief, the effect of discontinued participation was positively significant for Latino students (β = .14, SE = .06, p = .018) and African American students (β = .326, SE = .045, p < .001) while the effect of discontinued participation was negatively significant for Euro-American students (β = −.12, SE = .05, p = .017). For valuing of education, the effect of continuous participation was positive and significant only for Latino students (β = .10, SE = .03, p = .001) whereas the effect of discontinued participation was negative and significant only for Euro-American students (β = −.15, SE = .05, p = .004). For teacher-rated classroom engagement, the effect of discontinued participation was positive and significant only for African American students (β = .16, SE = .06, p = .009), whereas the effect of delayed participation was positively significant only for Latino students (β = .22, SE = .09, p = .011).

Discussion

The present study is the first to employ the weighted propensity score analyses to control for students’ probability of participating in school-sponsored extracurricular activities. Given the frequent caveat that individual, family, and school characteristics associated with participation profiles may account for observed associations between participation and outcomes, it is surprising that propensity score analyses has not previously been used in this body of research. When propensity scores are calculated on a large number of variables associated with the predictor and the outcome, as the case in the present study, propensity score analyses employing weights or matching closely mimic the results of an experimental study (West et al., 2014). Although we cannot definitively rule out the possibility that preexisting differences on some unmeasured variable potentially accounts for the results, this possibility is greatly reduced given the breadth of the baseline assessment and the balance achieved on the covariates across participation categories. The present study also controlled for students’ baseline scores on each outcome measure, thereby substantially increasing the internal validity of the effects detected in this study. Thus, results provide strong support for the conclusion that participation in school-sponsored sports and performance arts or clubs in middle school has a positive impact on students’ academic motivation and achievement at the transition to high school. Furthermore, the broad activity domain (sports or performance arts/clubs) and duration of participation are differentially predictive of academic outcomes.

Activity Domain

Sports participation predicted competence beliefs and educational value, whereas participation in performance arts/clubs predicted competence beliefs, teacher-rated classroom engagement, and teacher-awarded grades. The finding that both activity domains predicted an increase in academic competence beliefs suggests that extracurricular activities provide a context in which students can meet and overcome challenges and increase one’s skill level, thereby building confidence. The finding that performance arts/clubs but not sports predicts achievement is consistent with prior research and with the proposition that the social context for band and academic clubs provides greater reinforcement for academic achievement than is the case for sports (Denault & Poulin, 2009aFredricks & Eccles, 2008). Importantly, the current study’s methodology provides a stronger basis for concluding that the association between activity context and achievement is due to differences in participation context rather than differences in student and family characteristics associated with selection into different contexts. Notably, we calculated two propensity scores based on the two broad activity domains (i.e., the propensity to participate in sports and the propensity to participate in performance arts/clubs). The decision to create separate propensity scores was based on prior research finding differences in characteristics associated with participation in sports and non-sports (Feldman & Matjasko, 2007). For example, in a study of Canadian youth, Denault and Poulin (2009b) reported that number of problem behaviors at Grade 6 was positively associated with sports participation but not with performance arts/clubs at Grade 7. Of interest, in the current study, the correlation between propensity scores for sports participation and propensity scores for performance arts/clubs was not statistically significant (r = −.07). That is, students who select participation in sports and students who select participation in performance arts/clubs differ on a range of student and family characteristics prior to participation. Failure to take these differences into account may lead to erroneous conclusions regarding differential benefits associated with different types of activities.

Duration of Participation

Turning to patterns of participation, although continuous participation in an activity domain was most consistently associated with benefits, students who began participation in an activity domain in Grade 8 (delayed pattern) accrued nearly as many benefits as did students who began participation in Grade 7 and continued in Grade 8. Conversely, with the exception of competence beliefs for performance arts/clubs, students who began a participation domain in Grade 7 but quit in Grade 8 did not differ from nonparticipants on Grade 9 outcomes. Thus, the number of years of participation is less important than the pattern of years (i.e., delayed pattern was more helpful than discontinued pattern even though each pattern involves one year of participation). Unfortunately, the present study does not have information on the reasons students discontinued participation. Students who discontinue may have had negative experiences in the activity or may have not had the opportunity to participate due to participation requirements such as grades or tryout performance.

Gender

As expected, girls and boys are equally likely to participate in extracurricular activities, but boys are more likely to select sports participation than girls, and girls are more likely than boys to select performance arts/clubs. Benefits of continuous participation in each activity domain were similar for girls and boys. Gender moderated the effect of three noncontinuous participation patterns. Because we proffered no hypotheses regarding gender moderation and ran 12 tests for each activity domain (for a total of 24 tests), these three significant effects may be due to chance and should be interpreted with considerable caution. Further complicating interpretation of gender moderation of noncontinuous patterns of participation is a lack of consideration in these analyses for more complex patterns of participation, including switching from one domain to another.

Ethnicity

Consistent with prior research, Latino students in our sample had a lower rate of participation in extracurricular activities than Euro-American or African American youth. African American students were less likely than Euro-American youth to participate in performance arts/clubs but did not differ from Euro-American youth in sports participation. The lower rate of participation among Latino students in extracurricular activities may be due to a number of factors, including (a) less parental understanding of the academic benefits of participation and a corresponding lack of support for participation; (b) the value of obligation to the family within the Latino culture, which may lead students to work or take care of younger siblings instead of participating in what may be viewed as a social activity; and (c) practical constraints such as transportation and expenses associated with participation (Garner, 2013).

We expected that extracurricular participation would be more beneficial for Latino than for Euro-American or African American youth. Limited support for this hypothesis was found.

Specifically, in the domain of performance arts/clubs, discontinued participation in performance arts/clubs predicted higher competence beliefs for Latino and African American youth but lower competence beliefs for Euro-American youth. Delayed participation positively predicted teacher-rated engagement only for Latino youth. Finally, continuous participation predicted higher valuing of education for Latinos and lower valuing of education for Euro-Americans. In summary, Latino students are least likely to participate in extracurricular activities but as likely as or more likely than other ethnic groups to benefit from participation. Extracurricular activities are key social groups with which adolescents identify (Simpkins et al., 2011). Furthermore, consistent with social identity complexity theory, such participation predicts greater cross-ethnic friendships and more positive intergroup attitudes (Knifsend & Juvenon, 2014). The present study suggests that Latino students are deprived of participation opportunities, which likely contributes to low social integration at school and a lower sense of school belonging, both strong predictors of school engagement and completion of high school (Janosz et al., 2008).

Study Limitations and Future Directions

Results need to be interpreted in the context of study limitations. First, because participants in the study were selected on the basis of academic risk when they entered first grade, results may not generalize to samples entering school with above average literacy skills. The sample is also predominantly low SES. Because low SES and below average literacy skills in first grade predict subsequent academic failure, including dropping out of school, the current sample is an important one for understanding the role of extracurricular participation in reducing academic failure and improving low educational attainment.

Second, the investigation of ethnic differences in benefits associated with extracurricular participation is hindered by failure to take into account the heterogeneity that exists within each ethnic group. Previous studies have identified important differences within Latino groups associated with extracurricular participation, including generational status, language spoken in home, cultural orientation or acculturation, and SES (Peguero, 2010Simpkins et al., 2011). School-level factors, such as the ethnic composition of the school, may also moderate the effect of extracurricular participation (masked). Future studies conducted within Latino samples are necessary to clarify which Latino youth are most likely to benefit from extracurricular participation, in what school and activity contexts.

Third, our categorization of activities as sports or performance arts/clubs does not capture variations in the transactions occurring within specific sports (e.g., football vs. tennis) or performance arts/clubs (e.g., band vs. student council). As observed by Guest and McRee (2008), the links between activity contexts and adjustment are likely explained by social factors such as relationships, identities, and norms within specific activity settings more so than the content of an activity itself. Unfortunately, the present study is not capable of identifying those transactions occurring in activity contexts that may account for observed benefits.

Fourth, our category of discontinued participation (i.e., participating in a particular activity domain in Grade 7 and not continuing in that activity domain in Grade 8) does not distinguish between students who switched activity domains and students who were not involved in any activity domain in Grade 8. Approximately 20% of students in the discontinued groups switched activity domains. Future studies with larger, multiethnic samples are needed to distinguish between students who discontinue one activity domain but continue to be involved in another activity domain.

Fifth, budget limitations allowed us to assess teacher ratings from only one teacher, typically the language arts teacher. Aggregation of ratings from multiple teachers of subject matter courses common to all students in these grades would enhance the reliability of the teacher ratings.

Implications for Policy and Practice

Despite study limitations, the “big picture” is clear: Extracurricular participation in Grades 7 and 8 or only in Grade 8 in middle school promotes academic motivation and achievement for at-risk youth. Furthermore, these benefits are generally similar for boys and girls and for members of different ethnic groups. Because the current sample is predominantly low SES and ethnically diverse and entered first grade with below average literacy skills, study findings suggest that policies and practices that increase extracurricular participation during the critical middle school years are likely to improve school success for students at risk for poor educational attainment. Schools differ in a number of ways that may expand or limit opportunities for participation, including the number of activities offered, the financial costs to students associated with participation, academic requirements for eligibility to participate, and the level of competition for inclusion. It is important for schools and families to view participation as an educational asset rather than an expendable option, thereby increasing opportunities for participation by all students.

The finding of lower participation among Latino youth is of considerable concern given the importance of participation to improving school engagement and school completion among all ethnic groups (Donegan, 2008). Although Latinos were less likely to participate in extracurricular activities than other ethnicities, participation had an equal or, in some cases, larger impact on Latino youths’ academic competence beliefs, valuing of education, teacher-rated engagement, and letter grades. Results of a qualitative study (Garner, 2013) of middle school Latino students suggested that family obligations such as working to help with family finances and caring for younger children, lack of parent understanding of the academic benefits of extracurricular activities and a corresponding lack of support for participation, and practical constraints such as transportation and expenses serve as barriers to participation. Studies have found that parent encouragement of participation is particularly important to Latino students’ decisions to participate in extracurricular activities (Dunn, Kinney, & Hofferth, 2003;Shannon, 2006). Thus, specific outreach to Latino students and their parents, emphasizing the connection between participation and school success, and remedies to lessen practical constraints such as transportation may increase participation among this segment of the population. Given the heterogeneity within the Latino group on variables that may affect participation, including immigrant generational status and English language proficiency (Peguero, 2010), schools are advised to employ focus groups and surveys to gain a better understanding of factors that influence participation in their particular community. For example, there may be particular activities, such as soccer, that are not available at a particular school but that, if offered, might be an attractive option for Latino students in that school community.

Conclusion

Using propensity score analyses to remove selection bias, the study found that participation in extracurricular activities in middle school promotes positive school identities, behavioral engagement in the classroom, and letter grades at Grade 9, above students’ performance on the same or similar measures administered at Grade 5. Participation in sports and performance arts/clubs are associated with different outcomes; consequently, students who participate in both sports and performance arts/clubs likely experience the broadest benefits. Students who begin an activity context in Grade 8 gain benefits comparable to students who begin an activity in Grade 7 and continue into Grade 8. Positive school identities, behavioral engagement in classroom, and course grades at the beginning of high school are highly predictive of ultimate success in completing high school (Donegan, 2008Janosz et al., 2008;Legault, Green-Demers, & Pelletier, 2006). Given the at-risk nature of the sample, findings suggest the potential impact of extracurricular participation in middle school on reducing dropout rates and ethnic and income disparities in educational attainment.

Appendix

  • This research was funded by grant HD 039367 from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development awarded to Jan N. Hughes.

  • Received March 10, 2015.
  • Revision received June 8, 2016.
  • Accepted July 30, 2016.

MYUNG HEE IM, PhD, is a researcher at the American Institute for Research, 1000 Thomas J. Jefferson Street NW, Washington, DC 2007; e-mail:myunghee.im@gmail.com . Her research interests include measurement invariance and latent growth analysis under multilevel modeling and structural equation modeling. She has conducted large-scale longitudinal data analyses to investigate the impact of grade retention on students’ academic achievement and engagement.

JAN N. HUGHES, PhD, is professor emerita at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include peer relationships, teacher-student relationships, social and emotional development, and academic achievement. She has conducted large-scale longitudinal studies to investigate risk and protective processes in children and adolescents.

QIAN CAO is a doctoral student in the Research, Measurement, and Statistics Program in the Department of Educational Psychology at Texas A&M University. She holds the position of graduate research assistant. Her research interests include longitudinal data analyses, structural equation modeling, and measurement invariance.

OI-MAN KWOK, PhD, holds the position of professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at Texas A&M University and teaches in the Learning Sciences Program. His research interests include structural equation modeling and longitudinal data analysis.

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The Socio-affective Impact of Acceleration and Ability Grouping: Recommendations for Best Practice

by Maureen Neihart  in the The Gifted Child Quarterly51.4 (Fall 2007): 330-341.

Although the academic gains associated with acceleration and peer ability grouping are well documented, resistance to their use for gifted students continues because of concerns that such practices will cause social or emotional harm to students. Results from the broad research indicate that grade skipping, early school entrance, and early admission to college have socioaffective benefits for gifted students who are selected on the basis of demonstrated academic, social, and emotional maturity, but may be harmful to unselected students who are arbitrarily accelerated on the basis of IQ,
achievement, or social maturity.

There is little research on the socio-affective effects of peer ability grouping. The limited evidence indicates strong benefits for highly gifted students and possibly for some minority or disadvantaged gifted students. Robust evidence does not exist to support the idea that heterogeneous classroom grouping per se significantly increases the risk for adjustment problems among moderately gifted students. Recommendations for best practice based on the available evidence are presented.

Putting the Research to Use: What is the best educational placement for a gifted student? What grouping or acceleration options are most beneficial? Many of us grapple with these decisions every week. We sometimes hesitate to pursue certain programming options out of concern for the gifted child’s psychological adjustment. Decisions are often complicated by conflicting claims made about the social or emotional consequences of acceleration and peer ability grouping for gifted students, in particular. Analyzing and synthesizing a body of empirical research is one way to answer these questions and to recommend best practices. My hope is that the analysis and synthesis I offer here will provide some evidence-based guidance for these important decisions and that in the future, such decisions will be approached systematically on the basis of the best evidence. More importantly, I am optimistic that this synthesis will encourage educational leaders to reevaluate their school district policies and practices regarding acceleration and ability grouping and will strengthen their confidence to institute policies that reflect the best evidence. This synthesis helps to clarify what we do not know, as well as what we do know, about ways in which the consequences of acceleration and peer ability grouping vary in different contexts and raises pointed questions for future research

In spite of the well-documented academic benefits of Acceleration and peer ability grouping (Colangelo, Assouline, & Gross, 2004; Cornell, Callahan, Bassin, & Ramsay, 1991; Gagné & Gagnier, 2004; Gross, 1993, 2003; Kulik & Kulik, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1992; Lubinski, 2004; Lubinski, Webb, Morelock, & Benbow, 2001; Moon, Swift, & Shallenberger, 2002; Noble, Arndt, Nicholson, Sletten, & Zamora, 1999; Richardson & Benbow, 1990; Rogers, 2004; Southern & Jones, 1991; Swiatek & Benbow, 1991), there is ongoing resistance to increasing the use of either in many public schools. The reasons were given often have to do with concerns about the potential for social or emotional harm to students (Colangelo et al., 2004; Southern, Jones, & Fiscus, 1989). Parents express concern that acceleration will isolate their children or will be too stressful emotionally. Teachers and administrators hesitate over concerns about burnout and adjustment problems years down the road. What can we say in response? What do we know about the immediate and long-term socio-affective impact of acceleration on gifted students? Is there any research on the socio-affective impact of peer ability-grouping to guide us? What recommendations can we make for best practice?

Given that several comprehensive reviews of the research on acceleration and on peer ability grouping are available (Brody, Muratori, & Stanley, 2004; Cornell et al., 1991; Gross & van Vliet, 2005; Kulik & Kulik, 1982, 1984, 1992; Lubinski, 2004; Moon & Reis, 2004; Proctor, Black, & Feldhusen, 1986; Robinson, 2004; Rogers, 1992; Slavin, 1987; Southern & Jones, 1991), another review will not be offered here. Instead, the aim of this article is to pull from the research those findings that specifically address the socio-affective impact of acceleration and peer ability grouping and to make recommendations for best practice based on the evidence. The goal is to guide the practitioner in evidence-based decision making regarding the utilization of these two educational options for gifted students.

The Socioaffective Impact of Acceleration

Academic acceleration of high-ability youth is one of the most well-researched topics in education. The growing number of universities accepting younger students and the success of the talent search programs in identifying exceptional academic talent nationwide have made it easier to locate and assess accelerated students, resulting in an ever-growing body of research (Bower, 1990; Brody & Benbow, 1987; Gross, 1993, 2003; Heinbokel, 1997; Plucker & Taylor, 1998; Pollins, 1983; Prado & Scheibel, 1995; Richardson & Benbow, 1990; Swiatek & Benbow, 1991; Thomas, 1993). Although acceleration can take many forms, the three most commonly studied are the early entrance to the school, early entrance to college, and grade skipping. Studies of these forms of acceleration consistently fail to find evidence of any negative social or emotional effects for nearly all accelerants (Brody et al., 2004; Cornell et al., 1991; Gross, 1993, 2003; Gross & van Vliet, 2005; Robinson, 2004; Rogers, 1992), and numerous studies have identified social or emotional benefits. Table 1 lists the most common socio-affective benefits, along with samples of the empirical studies reporting them.

Although the majority of studies find that acceleration does no harm in either the short or long term, few studies find that it results in a socio-affective advantage for gifted students. In the most thorough analysis of the social and emotional effects of acceleration, Rogers (1992) reviewed 81 studies that investigated the social or emotional impact of acceleration and, using Slavin’s (1986, 1987) best-evidence synthesis technique, found positive effects in both social (mean effect size = 0.46) and emotional (mean effect size = 0.12) aspects. Social effects were typically examined via social maturity scores, teacher ratings of social skills, participation in extracurricular activities, and leadership positions held. Emotional effects typically referred to measures of self-concept or teacher or parent ratings of risk taking, independence, and creativity. Rogers (1992) noted significant emotional effects(effect size = .58) for subject-based acceleration in particular.

Several excellent longitudinal studies of accelerated gifted students have tracked the long-term effects of acceleration and found long-lasting social and emotional benefits (Gross, 1993, 2003; Lubinski, 2004; Lubinski et al., 2001). Among them, Gross’s (1993, 2003; Gross & van Vliet, 2005) study of 60 Australian children with an IQ of 160+ is noteworthy as the only comparison of children who were radically accelerated with those who were not. Of the 17 students in her study who were able to accelerate radically, there was not a single instance of harm or disadvantage as a result. In sharp contrast, however, was her finding that “the majority of children retained with age peers experienced significant and lasting difficulties in forming or maintaining friendships” (Gross & van Vliet, 2005, p. 159). Her study is unique in its demonstration that failure to accelerate was associated with significant adjustment problems.

Students who skip all or some of high school to enroll in college full time are the focus of a great many studies (Brody, Lupkowski, & Stanley, 1988; Brody & Stanley, 1991; Caplan, Henderson, Henderson, & Fleming, 2002; Ingersoll & Cornell, 1995; Janos et al., 1988; Janos, Sanfilippo, & Robinson, 1986; Lupkowski, Whitmore, & Ramsay, 1992; Muratori, Colangelo, & Assouline, 2003; Noble et al., 1999; Noble & Drummond, 1992; Olszweski-Kubilius, 1995; Robinson & Janos, 1986). These studies come to similar conclusions: Students who are carefully selected tend to do very well academically, socially, and emotionally. Early studies did observe negative social or emotional effects for some early entrants, but these were often ameliorated by a change in curriculum, a change in counseling support, or improved selection criteria.

Do any studies observe a negative socio-affective impact from acceleration? What about the common concerns that accelerated students will not fit in, that they will have problems making friends or be unhappy and have behavior problems? Among the hundreds of studies on acceleration, only three have observed negative emotional effects for accelerated children as a group. The negative effects noted are as follows: decline in academic self-concept (Marsh, Chessor, Craven, & Roche, 1995; Marsh & Hau, 2003; Zeidner & Schleyer, 1999), higher anxiety (Zeidner & Schleyer, 1999), and decline in grades (Zeidner & Schleyer, 1999).

Marsh and Hau’s (2003) ambitious, large-scale study of self-concept in a sample of more than 100,000 high school students in 26 countries from the Program of Student Assessment database for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development deserves mention for the controversy it has stirred up. The authors used multilevel modeling to analyze the relationship between self-concept, individual achievement, and school average achievement. They found that students in academically challenging programs had significantly lower self-concepts than did those in non-selective schools. Marsh and Hau argued persuasively that the observed decline in academic self-concept was a serious concern given that academic self-concept mediates educational aspirations, effort, motivation, and coursework selection.

Critics, however, warned that it is difficult to interpret these findings (Dai, 2004; Plucker et al., 2004). Is a higher academic self-concept and less anxiety necessarily better? What if it means that students have a distorted view of their competence? Plucker et al. (2004) reasoned

Is it possible that self-concepts are reduced but remain high (i.e., a modesty effect)? If so, we see the implications of this study quite differently. Indeed, recent research on competence suggests that people who are not skilled at something tend to think of themselves as being highly skilled, often underestimating the abilities of others (Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Kruger, 2003). Sternberg (1999) has proposed that this lack of realistic self-assessment prevents success in highly competitive fields: One needs a realistic view of one’s abilities in order to capitalize on personal strengths and compensate for weaknesses. For these reasons, being in the company of like-minded peers with whom one can relate, converse, and argue is a critical component of intellectual and social development that this study does not address, (p. 269)

In spite of the consistent evidence of socio-affective benefits for accelerants as a group, it is important to note that negative effects are occasionally observed for individuals. Some accelerated gifted students do exhibit problems with conduct or mood. Two examples will illustrate.

Richardson and Benbow (1990) asked more than 2,000 junior high students who scored high on the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT)-Math from 1972 to 1974 to complete questionnaires at ages 18 and 23. By age 18, more than one half the sample had accelerated their education. Richardson and Benbow found no differences between accelerants and nonaccelerants with respect to self-esteem, the locus of control, social interactions, identity, self-acceptance, or social and emotional problems. They also found no gender differences. At age 23, however, 3% of the respondents did view the acceleration as having a negative impact on their life.

Gagné and Gagnier (2004) asked 78 Canadian teachers, each with at least one early entrant in his or her classroom, to judge all of their students on four indicators of adjustment: interest in academic achievement, maturity toward school tasks (attention, concentration, and perseverance), social integration, and conduct. To minimize raters’ tendency to exaggerate positive ratings, the authors asked the teachers to choose the five most well-adjusted students in their class and rank them from 1 to 5 and then to choose the five least well-adjusted students and rank them from A to E. In their quantitative analysis, Gagné and Gagnier found no differences in adjustment between early entrants and regularly admitted students, but in their qualitative analysis they observed that teachers rated almost 30% of the early entrants as below average on two or more dimensions of adjustment.

We should conclude that the oft-cited concern that academic acceleration will cause social or emotional harm to gifted children is not supported in the empirical literature. There is no evidence that accelerated gifted students as a group will have problems making friends or getting along with others or that they will become overly stressed, depressed, or suicidal. However, there are documented cases of individual accelerated students having significant adjustment problems. We, therefore, cannot conclude that all gifted students should grade skip or enter kindergarten or enroll in college early.

Although research shows no substantial positive or negative socialization or psychological differences for grade skipping, early admission to college, or early entrance to kindergarten, we cannot make similar claims for other accelerative options, because they are not as well researched. It is impossible to draw solid conclusions about the social or emotional impact of Advanced Placement (AP) or honors classes, magnet schools, independent study, and curriculum compacting, for instance, because studies do not distinguish one form of acceleration from another and there is too much-uncontrolled variability in how students are selected for these options (Cornell et al., 1991). We can predict that gifted students who are carefully selected for accelerative options should not only experience academic benefits, but may also experience some social or emotional benefits as well and that there may be circumstances in which it is not the best option for certain individuals. Risks can possibly be minimized by using a tool like the IowaAcceleration Scale (Assouline, Colangelo, Lupkowski-Shoplik, & Lipscomb, 2003) to select candidates carefully.

Given that there is little evidence to support the idea that gifted children who are accelerated manifest better social and emotional adjustment than those who are not accelerated, primarily because few studies compared gifted accelerated children with those who did not accelerate (e.g., see Gross, 2003), we do not have sufficient evidence to make the claim that gifted children who are accelerated do better socially or emotionally than do gifted children who are not accelerated.

The Socioaffective Impact of Peer Ability Grouping

There is ample evidence in the literature that grouping students of high ability together benefits their achievement (Brody & Benbow, 1987; Brody & Stanley, 1991; Gamoran & Berends, 1987; Isaacs & Duffus, 1995; Janos & Robinson, 1985; Kolloff, 1989; Kulik & Kulik, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1990; Louetal., 1996; Rogers, 1992, 1993, 2004; Slavin, 1990; Southern & Jones, 1991; Starko, 1988; Vaughn, Feldhusen, & Asher, 1991), but few have examined its socioaffective impact (AdamsByers, Whitsell, & Moon, 2004; Gross, 1993, 2003; Gross & van Vliet, 2005; Kulik & Kulik, 1982, 1987; Marsh et al., 1995; Marsh & Hau, 2003; Moon, Swift, & Shallenberger, 2002; Shields, 1995; Zentall, Moon, Hall, & Grskovic, 2001). How clear is it that such grouping provides social or emotional benefits? Is there empirical evidence that failure to group students by ability harms some gifted students? What socioaffective impact, if any, doesability grouping have?

The literature on the socioaffective effects of peer ability grouping is not nearly as extensive as it is on acceleration, and thedebate about ability grouping is often confounded by mixing of terms. Peer grouping is defined in the literature as any arrangement that attempts to place students with similar levels of ability in instructional groups. The most common form is between-class abilitygrouping in secondary schools, but forms of within-class ability grouping are also seen, especially at the primary level, wherestudents are often grouped by ability within class for reading and, less often, math. Tracking (or streaming, as it is called in Europe) is a hotly debated but pervasive form of ability grouping in secondary schools in which students are assigned on the basis of ability to a series of classes. Most commonly these include a college-prep track, a vocational track, and a special education track. Tracking is a full-scale, permanent grouping of students by ability, as measured by test scores or grades. Ability grouping includes tracking, but not all ability grouping is tracking.

The overall conclusion is that various forms of ability grouping have differential effects for gifted students. Peer ability grouping seems to have positive socio-affective effects for some gifted students, neutral effects for others, and detrimental effects on a few. Table 2 lists the socio-affective benefits associated with peer ability grouping along with the studies reporting the benefits.

Among the studies that examined the impact of ability grouping on self-concept, some reported a decline in self-concept (Gross, 2003; Kulik & Kulik, 1984; Shields, 1995), others reported again (McQuilkin, 1981), and some reported no change (Maddux, Scheicher, & Bass 1982; Vaughn et al., 1991). Even within studies, differential effects on self-concept are observed. For instance, Rogers’ (1992) best-evidence synthesis found differential effects on self-esteem for different grouping arrangements: small gains for nongraded classrooms and early entrance to college, small losses for subject acceleration, and no differences for AP.

Although some authors view a decline in self-concept as a serious concern (see, e.g., Marsh & Hau, 2003), others perceive the decline as simply an adjustment to a more realistic perception of one’s abilities (see, e.g., Plucker et al., 2004; Rogers, 2004) or a reflection of a new realization of the discrepancy between their ability and their achievement (Gross, 2003).

Studies that use student self-report measures to explore the socio-affective impact of ability grouping also report mixed findings. For instance, in their survey of gifted students’ perceptions of homogeneously and heterogeneously grouped classrooms, Adams-Byers et al. (2004) reported that their 44 subjects “perceived mixed-ability grouping to offer the greatest number of social/emotional advantages and high-ability grouping to offer the greatest number of academic advantages” (p. 10). However, 54% of the self-reported disadvantages of ability grouping were related to a decrease in achievement status due to the greater competition in such classrooms.

In another example, Shields (1995) used a questionnaire to assess the attitudes and perceptions of fifth- and eighth-grade gifted students in homogeneous and heterogeneous classrooms and came up with some unexpected results. First, both fifth- and eighth grade students in homogeneous classrooms reported more development of their career interests. Eighth grade students in heterogeneous classrooms demonstrated greater academic self-concept than those in homogeneous classrooms. No significant differences were noted in perceptions of autonomy, independent development, peer relations, enjoyment of school, or involvement in school activities.

A study noteworthy for its finding that heterogeneous grouping may have deleterious social and emotional effects on high-ability students is Farmer and Farmer’s (1996) comparison of social affiliations. They studied patterns of social affiliations in third- and fourth-grade gifted students, students with learning disabilities, and students with emotional or behavioral disorders in mixed-ability classrooms. They observed that students tended to form affiliations within only one cluster and that these affiliations were based on shared social or personal characteristics.

“[B]oys receiving AG [academically gifted] services seemed to thrive when there were enough of them in a classroom to allow them to form a core prosocial group. In the absence of this critical mass, though, the social positioning of boys with AG services was not nearly as positive” (p. 447).

The authors observed that gifted boys, in particular, tended to rely on antisocial behaviors and affiliations to gain a central social position in the classroom when the classroom lacked a “critical mass” of gifted boys.

The socio-affective impact of ability grouping is further illuminated by a few studies that investigated the academic and personal adjustment of talented minority students (Diaz, 1998; Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Hebert, 1996, 2001; Isaacs & Duffus, 1995; Jones, 2003; Kuriloff & Reichert, 2003). These studies stressed the contribution of peer support networks to persistence with challenging curriculum and successfully transitioning to challenging postsecondary options. They provide limited empirical support that ability grouping facilitates satisfactory peer relationships that may be crucial to keeping students who face barriers to high achievement-like language, social isolation, and discrimination engaged in challenging coursework and in keeping motivation and aspirations high.

However, differential results are observed among them as well. For instance, Kuriloff and Reichert’s (2003) qualitative study of 27 high school boys in an elite prep school observed that talented Black students who formed a cohesive peer group were able to better negotiate the social geography of the school. Kuriloff and Reichert postulated that being surrounded by peers who were also thinking of going to college, who were also struggling with crossing economic, cultural, or racial borders, and with whom students could share strategies for negotiating the unique social terrain of the school may have reduced the attrition of talented minority students from challenging coursework. In contrast, Jones (2003) concluded in her study of 10 talented women from working-class backgrounds that participation in advanced classes sometimes intensified the experience of marginality and visibility experienced by working class, minority gifted students because in such classes they developed greater awareness of advantage and disadvantage, privilege and injustice, at an earlier age. The apparent contradiction between Jones’s findings and those of Kuriloff and Reichert may be due to the opportunities students had in their peer groups to discuss the affiliation conflicts they felt. It is not clear from Jones’s study whether her subjects had the opportunity to discuss or externalize the conflicts they experienced. It may be that for gifted minority students, peer grouping itself is not as important as having regular opportunities to explore the conflicts they feel regarding affiliation and achievement.

In contrast to those studies that report social or psychological benefits, several studies observed negative socio-affective effects of ability grouping (Adams-Byers et al., 2004; Marsh et al., 1995; Marsh & Hau, 2003; Zeidner & Schleyer, 1999; Zentall et al., 2001). The most common finding is a significant drop in self-concept among high-ability students who are homogeneously grouped, but Zeidner and Schleyer (1999) also observed higher levels of anxiety in homogeneously grouped children.

Highlighting the complexity of the variables involved is a study by Zentall et al. (2001). They conducted the only empirical study examining the socio-affective adjustment of accelerated gifted students with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD) in a self-contained classroom. They compared gifted AD/HD students in a self-contained accelerated classroom with gifted peers without AD/HD in the same classroom and average AD/HD students in a regular classroom and found that though the gifted AD/HD students did well academically, they had trouble with social relations. Zentall et al. concluded that “gifted students with AD/HD may be at risk for problems with social/emotional development if they are accelerated with their GT peers without further accommodations for their AD/HD disability” (as cited in Moon & Reis, 2004, p. 114).

Adding to our understanding of the socio-affective impact of ability grouping on gifted students are the results of two studies that observed a negative impact in mixed-ability classrooms. Gross (1989) observed social rejection and alienation, and Baker, Bridger, and Evans (1999) reported decreased motivation and disinterest in school.

Rogers (1993) aptly concludes:

What seems evident about the spotty research on socialization and psychological effects when grouping by ability is that no pattern of improvement or decline can be established. It is likely that there are many personal, environmental, family, and other extraneous variables that affect self-esteem and socialization more directly than the practice of grouping itself, (p. 10)

Best Practice Recommendations

Given the findings from the research and the limitations of the studies, what best practice recommendations can we make for acceleration and ability grouping in terms of the social and emotional benefits? Regarding acceleration, we can say the following:

* Acceleration should be routine for highly gifted children. All highly gifted children should be evaluated for grade skipping, in particular.

* Acceleration options should be available for capable students. No school district or school administrator should have a policy that prohibits accelerative options for students, including grade skipping.

* All school districts should have written policies or procedures in place to ensure that acceleration options (e.g., grade skipping, early entrance to kindergarten, and early admission to college) are available in all schools and to guide parents and teachers in the steps to follow for referral and evaluation of students.

* Students who are being considered for acceleration should be screened for social readiness, emotional maturity, and motivation for acceleration. A tool, such as The Iowa Acceleration Scale (Assouline et al., 2003), may help to select candidates for acceleration.

* When possible, students who are grade skipping or making an early entrance to college should do so as part of a cohort. There appear to be benefits to cohort acceleration that are more difficult to replicate when students go it alone.

* Young students considering early college entrance should begin taking one or more college-level classes to gain experience with the social, cognitive, and academic expectations of such classes before attending college full time.

* Similarly, candidates for early entrance to kindergarten should ideally have some experience with preschool before enrolling in kindergarten.

* In selecting candidates for acceleration, educators should consider the possibility that a student who demonstrates low motivation, social withdrawal or isolation, and negative attitudes toward school or academic work might, in fact, be a good candidate for acceleration options.

* All gifted students are not good candidates for grade skipping, early entrance to kindergarten, or early admission to college.

Given that few studies examined peer ability grouping for socialization or psychological effects, what recommendations can we make regarding peer ability grouping? We can suggest the following:

* The menu of grouping arrangements available to gifted students should be expanded so that we meet the diverse needs of this population. Ask “What grouping options do we currently not offer?” and strive to make it available.

* Although peer ability grouping is associated with strong achievement benefits, it appears to pose social or emotional challenges for some gifted children. Do not promote it as the panacea for all.

* It should be recognized that twice-exceptional children may face significant difficulties with social adjustment when ability grouped if accommodations are not made for their disabilities.

* One should keep in mind that students’ preference for mixed-ability grouping arrangements may be reflective of their desire to maintain their perceived achievement status, rather than an indication of any real difficulties with peer relations.

* Staff development should be made the highest priority so that every mixed-ability classroom has a teacher who can deliver accelerated instruction to high-ability students. It is well established that both academic and socio-affective gains are associated with the advanced instruction for gifted students.

We should also stress that any discussion about ability grouping must address the valid concern that grouping in the past has been associated with inequality of opportunity (Oakes, 1985; Pool & Page, 1995; Rosenbaum, 1980). Ability grouping has historically discriminated on the basis of class (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003). Affluent children are three times as likely as disadvantaged children to be placed in high-ability groups, and even though scores of ability or achievement are the primary determinants of such placements, class-based factors come in second (Dauber, 1996; Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003). Peer ability grouping is also often viewed as a race issue, because accelerated or high-ability classes have traditionally been dominated by affluent White children, whereas lower ability classes and special education programs have been dominated by children of color from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. These are important issues that are not easily resolved. Indeed, they are the basis for some authorities’ insistence that the only satisfactory option for all children is placement in heterogeneous classrooms with differentiated instruction, even though research demonstrates that this option does not meet the needs of some children (Gamoran & Mare, 1989; Oakes, 1985).

Proponents of peer ability grouping for gifted children typically emphasize that they are not advocating for tracking, per se, but for flexible ability grouping. However, the reality is often not congruent with rhetoric, and in practice, peer ability grouping effectively becomes tracking in many schools in the United States, especially at the high school level. Our common neglect of this valid concern perpetuates the sometimes adversarial and vitriolic debates about the benefits of homogeneous grouping for high ability students. Given that peer grouping is about separation and divisions, any kind of ability grouping is anathema to those who believe that inclusion is the only way to guarantee equity. Within-class groups must be very flexible and provide opportunities for all students to change groups according to their abilities on specific skills. We must be prepared not only to address these concerns but also to work to ensure fair allocation of resources and quality instruction for all children.

Limitations of the Research

The body of literature on the social and emotional effects of acceleration and ability grouping has four serious limitations. The first is that most of it is descriptive or correlational by design. Well-controlled, randomized design studies are simply not undertaken for obvious reasons, so findings are always based on samples or methodologies that are flawed in some way.

A serious second limitation is that most studies rely on subjective perceptions of adjustment by students, parents, or teachers, rather than on objective measures of psychological indices that are known to be related to positive and negative adjustment. Future research that compares gifted students who are ability grouped or accelerated with those who are not on standardized, objective measures of adjustment would strengthen the empirical base for specific recommendations.

A third limitation is that the common methodology in research on grade-skipping and early entrance to college is ex post facto design, a methodology limited in that it does not control for preexisting group differences on outcome measures. Therefore, we must make caveats before making broad generalizations about the social or emotional impact of acceleration and ability grouping.

The fourth limitation is the voluntary nature of participation in most accelerated or ability-grouped programs. There may be significant differences between those students (and their families) who choose to accelerate learning, select homogenous grouping options, and even load up on advanced classes and their gifted classmates who do not pursue these options. It may be that students who make such choices are better adjusted and demonstrate greater social and emotional maturity than those who do not.

It is often impossible in the research to separate the effects of the accelerated content from the effects of peer ability grouping. When benefits are observed, was it the advanced curriculum that made the difference or the new access to true peers? Gross’s (Gross, 2003, 2004; Gross & van Vliet, 2005) analyses suggest that it was some of both.

Unanswered Questions

With the exception of Gross’s longitudinal study (1993, 2003; Gross & van Vliet, 2005) no studies examined the socio-affective impact of capable children who were eligible for accelerative options and remained in the regular classroom. Is there harm in not pursuing such options? Gross (1993, 2003) found significant negative effects for the highly gifted children in her sample. Similarly, what happens to students who are dissatisfied in the regular classroom and seek accelerative options to no avail? We do not have research to address that question either.

Few of the studies on early college admission compared early entrants with non-accelerants to help determine the extent to which acceleration contributes to the observed positive effects (Janos, Robinson, & Lunneborg, 1989; Noble, Robinson, & Gunderson, 1993; Robinson, 2004; Robinson & Janos, 1986). It is possible that students who choose early entrance to college are different from those who do not on some other variable that contributes to their success. Given that few studies compare matched samples of early entrants with students who choose to stay in high school, we do not know how much better or worse their adjustment is than that of students who enter college at age 18. Is the initial period of adjustment for freshman tougher if they are 16 or 14? What differences, if any, are there between gifted college students who enter college at 18 and those who enter at younger ages? What kinds of support, family history, or personal characteristics if any, make a difference for early entrants (Robinson, 2004)?

Although there is a large volume of research on the impact of ability grouping on academic outcomes, there is little research on its effects on social or emotional indicators, making it harder to draw unequivocal recommendations. Most of the earlier research on ability grouping focused on issues of equity or the differences in achievement outcomes of students assigned to different ability groups (Hoffer, 1992; Natriello, Pallas, & Alexander, 1989; Oakes, 1985, 1989; Slavin, 1990). Little of the research has explored the ways in which ability grouping affects objective indices of social or emotional functioning.

Future research should explore the antecedents of various effects, and we need more studies conducted with comparison groups that rely on recognized standard measures of adjustment. We do not know how ability grouping affects motivation, efficacy, or perceptions of ability in oneself and others. We also know surprisingly little about the friendship patterns of gifted adolescents who are accelerated and those who are not.

Summary

Given that feelings, perceptions, attitudes, and social relations can facilitate or hinder learning, it is essential that the socio-affective impact of various educational practices be assessed. Regarding acceleration, we have sufficient research to conclude confidently that accelerated gifted children, as a group, are no more at risk for social or emotional difficulties than are other children. At the same time, there is little evidence to support the claim that accelerated gifted children have a socio-affective advantage over gifted children who are not accelerated.

Although the research consistently finds no ill group effects, some accelerated gifted children do have adjustment difficulties (e.g., Gagné & Gagnier, 2004). Important individual differences in perceived social and emotional adjustment have been noted among accelerated gifted children in some studies. Proponents of acceleration must be careful to acknowledge this and to guard against giving the impression that there are never any problems when children are accelerated.

Peer ability grouping has differential socio-affective effects and seems to be more advantageous for some students than for others. In particular, the limited research evidence suggests homogeneous grouping arrangements are more strongly associated with positive adjustment outcomes among highly gifted children, although this connection is less clear with moderately gifted students. Gross and van Vliet’s (2005) research does suggest that failure to accelerate some highly gifted children can cause relationship problems that last well into adulthood.

There is some evidence to suggest that peer ability grouping may also be more strongly related to positive social and emotional outcomes for gifted minority students, but more research is needed to verify whether this relationship exists for larger numbers of such students.

When the negative effects of ability grouping are observed we must use caution in our interpretation of them. In some cases, authors have interpreted the data to support a favored viewpoint, rather than putting forth multiple interpretations for consideration. For instance, the finding in some studies that accelerated students spend less time in social activities may indicate a negative change in socialization patterns, or it may indicate that the child is now happily spending more time in talent development and has less time and interest for social activities. A decline in self-esteem may indicate a negative attitude, or it may reflect a more realistic appraisal of one’s abilities.

Although the research finds academic and achievement benefits for ability grouping for gifted students, the research does not support the claim of social or emotional benefits for such grouping arrangements. Although advantages in peer relations, motivation, career development, and attitudes toward school have been documented for some gifted students, there is evidence that heterogeneous grouping is an advantage for others as long as the challenging curriculum is provided.

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AuthorAffiliation

Maureen Neihart

National Institute of Education, Singapore

AuthorAffiliation

Author’s Note: Address correspondence concerning this article to Maureen Neihart, Psychological Studies Academic Group, Blk 2 Level 3 Rm 78, National Institute of Education, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore 637616; e-mail: maureenneihart@gmail.com.

Note: This article accepted under the editorship of Paula OlszewskiKubilius.

AuthorAffiliation

Maureen Neihart, PsyD, is a licensed clinical child psychologist. She is coeditor of the text, The Social and Emotional Development ofGifted Children: What Do We Know? and has given several hundred talks and workshops worldwide. Dr. Neihart and her husband hail from Montana, where they were licensed as therapeutic treatment foster parents and worked with seriously emotionally disturbed adolescents in their home. In 2006, they moved to Singapore, where she is associate professor of psychological studies at theNational Institute of Education. In her spare time, Dr. Neihart enjoys camping, trekking, and writing fiction. Her one-act comedy TheCourt Martial of George Armstrong Custer was produced and filmed for local television in 2000.