A Dynamic Model of School Effects on Students' Achievement

• In Event: 287 - Section on Sociology of Education Paper Session. School, Peer, and Neighborhood Effects

Abstract

Abstract Studies of contextual effects during childhood usually use point-in-time measures to characterize individuals’ full contextual history. I argue that this approach fails to account for (1) age-based variation in young people’s sensitivity to their surroundings; (2) differential effects stemming from differences in the length of children’s exposures; and (3) moves between contexts and endogenous changes over time within them. To evaluate the merits of this argument, I specify and test a more dynamic model of school effects on children's academic performance. Drawing on recent advances in finite mixture modeling, I identify a series of distinct school context trajectories that extend across a substantial portion of respondents’ childhood years. I find that these trajectories vary substantially with respect to shape, with sizable numbers of students experiencing non-trivial changes in their environments over time and across grades. I then show that students’ trajectories of exposure are related to their 8th grade achievement, even after controlling for contemporaneous measures of school context.

Author

• Andrew Halpern-Manners, Indiana University