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Studies Confirm Three Common Sense Assumptions About Students
posted by: Steph | July 14, 2010, 04:39 PM   

Studies released recently have confirmed three basic facts about students that millions of common sense parents and teachers already knew:

  1. A study finds that students with home computers use them to play games, which has a negative impact on their education. Professors Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches studied Romanian students and found “strong evidence that children in households that won a voucher [to purchase a home computer] received significantly lower school grades in math, English, and Romanian.”

    Duke University professors studied broadband access and found that its introduction accompanied a dip in middle school test scores, particularly in lower income families where parental supervision may not be as ubiquitous.

    Marybeth Hicks, writer for The Washington Times, argues that parents have known this fact for years. If kids have access to a computer, they will use it to play games not for education. Hicks suggests that the real divide between students is less due to their access to technology and more due to parental involvement and discipline in the home.

  2. A study finds that National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores rise when students receive monetary incentive. EdWeek blog "Inside School Research" reports on an experiment that gave between $20 and $35 to students to encourage their effort on an otherwise unnecessary test. Results revealed that when students have a reason to put effort into the standardized test, their test scores improved significantly. Imagine that.

    “There is now credible evidence that NAEP may […] underestimate the reading abilities of students enrolled in 12th grade,” report the authors. Any teacher could have told the researchers this fact. When the test has no bearing on a student’s grades, graduation, or college acceptance, why would they try?

  3. A study finds that drug-testing reduces student drug use. The study, funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences and covered in Education Week, found that “students involved in extracurricular activities and subject to in-school random drug testing reported less substance abuse than their peers in high schools that didn’t have the testing programs.”

    Common sense might also suggest that the amount of substances tested for affected the reported drug use, and the study confirmed this. “There were larger effects [in the reported substance abuse] in districts that included alcohol and tobacco in their testing programs than in districts that did not include testing of those substances.”

Although teachers and parents have known these tidbits for years, statistical evidence now confirms the average American’s common sense. Thank goodness.

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