Academic achievement

About: Academic achievement is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 69460 publications have been published within this topic receiving 2227289 citations. The topic is also known as: academic performance & educational achievement.

Peer exclusion and victimization: Processes that mediate the relation between peer group rejection and children's classroom engagement and achievement?

Abstract: Longitudinal data from a study of kindergarten through 5th graders were used to estimate a structural model in which chronic peer exclusion and chronic peer abuse were hypothesized to mediate the link between children's early peer rejection, later classroom engagement, and achievement. Peer exclusion and abuse were expected to predict changes in 2 forms of school engagement (classroom participation and school avoidance), and changes in both forms of engagement were expected to predict changes in achievement. The model fit the data well and lent support to the premise that distinct forms of peer maltreatment and classroom engagement mediate the link between early peer rejection and changes in children's achievement. Early peer rejection was associated with declining classroom participation and increasing school avoidance, but different forms of chronic peer maltreatment mediated these relations. Whereas chronic peer exclusion principally mediated the link between peer rejection and classroom participation, chronic peer abuse primarily mediated the link between rejection and school avoidance. Children's reduced classroom participation, more than gains in school avoidance, anteceded decrements in children's achievement.

The Role of Perceptions of Prejudice and Discrimination on the Adjustment of Minority Students to College

Abstract: College participation by minority students declined in the middle 1980s following a period of sustained growth [21]. This trend was particularly evident among African Americans and Hispanics [46] who exhibited both the lowest participation rates as well as the highest propensity to drop out from college. Porter's [45] analyses of the high-school senior class of 1980, for instance, revealed that Hispanic college students were 13 percent more prone to withdraw from college than were white students, whereas African American college students were 22 percent more likely to drop out than their white counterparts over a six-year period. These low persistence rates (even over extended periods of enrollment in college) are particularly troublesome from a policy perspective given the relationship that the attainment of a bachelor's degree has on subsequent occupational and economic attainment [44]. Several reasons have been advanced to account for these trends. Hauser and Anderson [21] explored the extent to which declines in college participation rates could be attributed to changes in college aspirations as well as to changes in high-school completion rates among African Americans. After analyzing college aspiration trends for both minorities and nonminorities over a period of thirty years and taking into account high-school completion rates and indicators of socioeconomic status, Hauser and Anderson could not find support for this hypothesis. Other researchers have speculated that the decline could be attributed to changes in the composition of federal assistance and to patterns of financing higher education exhibited by minority students. Porter [45] noted that declines in minorities' college participation rates correlated with the growth of student loans at the expense of grants. Olivas [41], Mortenson and Wu [31], and Mortenson [30] observed that African American and Hispanic students were less willing to go into debt to finance their college education than were white students. Moreover, Ekstrom [19] helped to establish and test the proposition that students willing to go into debt to finance their education were more likely to enroll and persist in college. An alternative explanation to the role of finances in the persistence process has stressed the influence of academic preparation for college. Tinto [56] argued that overall differences in persistence rates between minorities and nonminorities were primarily due to differences in their academic preparedness rather than differences in their socioeconomic backgrounds. Tinto further contended that these ability differences arise from prior educational experiences at the elementary and secondary educational levels which tend to favor the educational achievement of nonminorities relative to minorities. Some degree of support has been given to this hypothesis. St. John, Kirshstein, and Noell [50], for instance, reported that the effects of ethnicity disappeared once academic preparation for college was taken into account for the high-school class of 1980. The proposition that a lack of adjustment to predominantly white institutions and that perceptions of prejudice (racial climate) may lower the quality of college experiences of minority students has emerged as a competing explanation for the differences in persistence rates between minority and nonminority college students [for example, 1, 18, 23, 24, 28, 34, 35, 36, 53]. Fleming [18], in particular, has argued that adjustment problems with the curriculum, lack of support services, financial problems and the nature of interpersonal relationships with faculty, peers and academic staff are some of the experiences that negatively impact minority students attending predominantly white institutions. Likewise, Tracey and Sedlacek [57, 58, 59] have contended that noncognitive factors (that is, self-concept, an understanding of racism, and the ability to cope with it) play a more critical role in shaping academic performance in college and persistence decisions among minority students than do cognitive factors such as academic ability and study habits. …

What Works in Professional Development

Abstract: hat do we really know about the relationship between professional development and improvements in student learning? What evidence validates that relationship, and how trustworthy is that evidence? What does that evidence tell us about the characteristics of truly effective professional development activities? These questions guided one of the largest and most inclusive syntheses of research on effective professional development conducted to date. Scholars from the American Institutes for Research analyzed findings from over 1,300 studies that potentially address the effect of professional development on student learning outcomes. The project was sponsored by the Regional Education Laboratory-Southwest (REL SW) and funded by the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. The findings from this comprehensive analysis, titled Reviewing the Evidence on How Teacher Professional Development Affects Student Achievement (Yoon et al. 2007), shed new light on the complex relationship between professional development and improvements in student learning. It is hoped that they also will lead to new and better research on this vitally important dimension of the educational improvement What Works in Professional Development?