(NCES 98-038) Ordering information
The most recent wave of concern over the level of academic achievement among our nation's school population began with the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983. The report left education researchers with an important question: How much does student achievement (for youth who stay in school) grow during different stages of students' schooling? To answer the question for the high school years, data are available describing the academic achievement of high school students between 8th and 12th grades in reading and mathematics. It also is important to examine differences between whites, blacks, and Hispanics in reading and mathematics achievement over these same years. Data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 on reading and mathematics achievement of students near the end of 8th and 12th grades reveal that:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject and grade ------------------------------------------------- Reading Mathematics -------------------- ----------------------- IRT scores* 8 10 12 8 10 12 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mean 28.5 32.3 34.4 38.1 46.0 50.5 Standard deviations 8.4 9.6 9.7 11.6 13.1 13.7 IRT score gains* 810 1012 812 810 1012 812 Gains 3.7 2.2 5.9 7.9 4.4 12.3 Gains per year in 8th grade standard deviations 0.22 0.13 0.17 0.34 0.19 0.26 --------------------------------------------------------------------------*Number of correct scores on tests equated across grades 8, 10, and 12 with item response theory (IRT).
One way to interpret the size of these gains is to convert 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade achievement scores into their percentile equivalents among 8th-graders (table 2). Twelfth-graders have mean 12th-grade reading scores equal to 8th-graders at the 68th percentile and mean mathematics scores equal to 8th-graders at the 75th percentile. The average student thus gains 4.5 8th-grade percentiles per year in reading and 6.2 8th-grade percentiles per year in mathematics.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject and grade ------------------------------------------------- Reading Mathematics ---------------------- ---------------------- 8th-grade percentiles 8 10 12 8 10 12 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mean 50.6 61.9 68.4 50.5 67.6 75.3 Gains in 8th-grade percentile 810 1012 812 810 1012 812 Yearly gain 5.7 3.3 4.5 8.6 3.9 6.2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------SOURCE: National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. See Ingels, et. al. (1994).
Many 8th-graders' scores are higher than those of the average 12th-grader, and many 12th-graders' scores are below those of the average 8th-grader. Table 3 shows the percentage of students at each grade level with achievement scores in each quarter of the eighth-grade distribution. About 28 percent of 12th-graders have scores that would put them in the bottom half of 8th-graders in reading, and about 20 percent of 12th-graders have mathematics scores in the bottom half of the 8th-grade distribution. These results suggest considerable overlap in the achievement distributions of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders.
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject and grade ------------------------------------------------ Reading Mathematics Percent in each -------------------- ---------------------- 8th-grade quartile 8 10 12 8 10 12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 025 24.9 18.2 13.4 24.9 12.3 7.2 2650 25.2 18.3 14.9 25.2 15.5 12.4 5175 25.0 20.2 18.8 25.0 23.0 19.5 76100 24.9 43.3 52.8 24.9 49.2 60.9 -----------------------------------------------------------------------SOURCE: National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. See Ingels, et. al. (1994).
Overall, these results show that achievement increases over the high school years, but that the gains are relatively modest compared to the range of variation in eighth grade. It is important to note that these results describe overall changes in the achievement distributions at each grade, and not the achievement gains of groups, such as blacks and Hispanics compared to whites.
------------------------------------------------------------------------- Race difference and subject ------------------------------------------ Blackwhite Hispanicwhite ----------------- ------------------ Reading Math Reading Math ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Eighth-grade differences -5.22 -9.02 -4.22 -6.42 2. Twelfth-grade differences -6.12 -10.32 -4.12 -6.42 3. Twelfth-grade differences among students with the same eighth-grade scores -0.8 -1.3 0.1 0.2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------1/ Number correct scores on tests equated across grades 8, 10, and 12 with item response theory (IRT).
While these results tell us that the race/ethnicity gap in reading and mathematics achievement at the end of 12th grade is no different statistically than at the end of 8th grade, they do not tell us how much of a race/ethnicity gap would exist at 12th grade among white, black, and Hispanic students with the same 8th grade achievement. The 12th-grade race/ethnicity gap reflects the fact that, on average, black and Hispanic students enter high school with different achievement levels than whites; that is, because the race/ethnicity gap exists at the end of 8th grade. Among students with the same 8th-grade achievement, the black and the Hispanic disadvantages in 12th-grade reading and mathematics vanish statistically (row 3).
Thus, the racial disparities in 12th-grade achievement reflect differences in achievement prior to entering high school. These results suggest that if blacks and Hispanics entered high school with the same achievement levels as whites, their differences from whites in 12th-grade reading and mathematics achievement would be extremely small and statistically insignificant.
Table 5 shows the race/ethnicity differences from table 4 divided by the average yearly growth in achievement scores from the end of grade 8 through grade 12. More intuitively, table 5 shows the number of years apart the race/ethnicity groups are in terms of achievement growth. At the end of the 12th grade, blacks are about 3-4 years of achievement growth behind whites, and Hispanics are about 2-3 years behind whites (line 1). Among students with the same 8th-grade achievement, however, the 12th-grade race/ethnicity differences after four years of high school are a half a year or less and are statistically insignificant (line 2).
------------------------------------------------------------------------- Race difference and subject ------------------------------------------ Blackwhite Hispanicwhite --------------- ------------------- Reading Math Reading Math ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. End of twelfth grade for all students -4.2 -3.3 -2.8 -2.1 2. End of twelfth grade for students with the same eighth grade test scores -0.5 -0.4 0.1 0.1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------SOURCE: National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. See Ingels, et. al. (1994).
The second conclusion is that the high school years do not contribute significantly to race/ethnicity differences in reading and mathematics achievement. Despite differences in the high schools attended by black, Hispanic, and white students, the 12th-grade reading and mathematics achievement differences between these groups reflects differences in how much they knew when they entered high school, and not on their race or ethnicity per se.
Ingels, S.J., Dowd, K. L., Baldridge, J.D., Stipe, J.L., Bartot, V.H., Frankel, M. R., Owings, J., & Quinn, P. (1994). National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. Second Follow-Up: Student Component Data File User's Manual. Washington: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, National Center for Education Statistics.
Jencks, C. (1985). "How Much Do High School Students Learn?" Sociology of Education, 58, 128-135.
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