Counseling, Higher Education & Special Education Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2757

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Achievement Gap

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    Which Skills Predict School Success? Socioemotional Skills and the Achievement Gap
    (2016) Boyars, Michal Y.; O'Neal, Colleen R; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This cross-sectional study examined the relations of four socioemotional skills with academic achievement among ethnic minority (e.g., Asian, Black, Latino/a, and multiethnic) and White elementary school students. Method: Participants included public school upper elementary students (N = 257; Mage = 9.71; 58% female; 10% Black, 5% Asian, 6% Latino/a, 12% multiracial; 61% White). Measures included student-reported grit, growth mindset, engagement, and emotion regulation, in addition to a student literacy achievement performance task (Test of Silent Reading Efficiency and Comprehension, TOSREC) and student reading achievement scores (Measures of Academic Progress in Reading; MAP-R). Results: Across all analyses, socioemotional skills were more related to literacy achievement for ethnic minority students than for White students. While simple regressions supported several skills’ relation to achievement for both groups of students, multiple regressions suggested that grit was the sole significant predictor of achievement, and it was only predictive of minority students’ achievement. Although literacy achievement differed between the full samples of ethnic minority and White students, moderation analyses indicated that this achievement gap disappeared among high grit students. Yet, while these regression and moderation results suggested grit’s unique role as a predictor, SEM analyses suggested that the magnitude of all of the socioemotional skills’ prediction of achievement were more similar than different. These findings support a novel but cautious approach to research on socioemotional skills and the achievement gap: results suggest that the skills operate differently in students of different ethnicities, with grit playing a uniquely predictive role for minority students. The skills, however, may be more similar than not in the strength of their association with literacy achievement.
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    A STUDY DETERMINING SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES IN TERRANOVA READING AND MATH SCORES BETWEEN EIGHTH GRADE AFRICAN AND EUROPEAN AMERICAN STUDENTS
    (2011) Smith, Barriett Jackson; McLaughlin, Margaret J.; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The participating school system's minority population, notably African Americans, ranked in the top five school systems in academic performance in reading and math when compared to other states and other African American populations across the United States. These measurements were taken from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The purpose of this investigation was to examine whether there was a significant achievement gap between races across system-wide assessments on a yearly basis. Results of the multivariate analyses of reading and mathematics scores indicated there were significant differences in both areas at the p <.05 level on the TerraNova, Third Edition. These significant differences lend support to the results of the NAEP testing in 2007 and again in 2009 that demonstrated the gap. Discussion of the implications of this gap for the school system was presented.