Exploring the Effect Sizes for Noncognitive Risk Factors on Academic Performance: The Relative Importance of Student and School Compositional Effects

• In Event: 18.051 - Nonacademic Factors and School Success

Abstract

Research has shown that non-cognitive factors are associated with student achievement, behavior, and future attainment. Other research has found that student-body characteristics generally referred to as “compositional effects,” are associated with a range of student outcome, but this line of research has focused mostly SES, race/ethnic, and achievement composition. This paper merges and extends these two largely separate lines of research to index the effect size of twelve non-cognitive skills and their school compositional effects on academic performance in high school. The results show that the compositional non-cognitive measures tend to have substantially larger effects on academic performance than the associated individual measures. The implications of these findings to school policies and practices are discussed.

Author

• Gregory J. Palardy, University of California - Riverside