Characteristics of High-Performing Students Who Are Eligible for the National School Lunch Program

• In Event: Investigating Academic Resilience Using Data From the 2017 NAEP

Abstract

Much research has shown that socioeconomic status (SES) plays a crucial role in predicting student achievement and in reproducing economic stratification across generations (e.g., Coleman et al., 1966; Reardon, 2011). Despite the achievement gap between high and low SES students, there is a certain number of students who are academically resilient – those who are from economically disadvantaged backgrounds but perform well. The purpose of this study is to examine the characteristics of those students, as well as their teachers and schools, using the largest nationally representative data, the 2017 grade 8 NAEP mathematics.

Although these academically resilient students beat the odds by performing exceptionally well at school, research consistently shows that they are less likely to apply for selective colleges and universities compared to low-performing peers from high SES backgrounds (Hoxby and Avery, 2012). To further understand the mechanism behind this, it is important to identify those students and examine their characteristics and surrounding contexts at the national level.

Eligibility for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) was used as a proxy of SES. NAEP has provided 20 plausible values for scale scores to accurately estimate population levels of proficiency and adopted three cut scores to define three achievement levels: Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. High-performing students in this study are defined as those who performed at either Proficient or Advanced on NAEP mathematics. With these variables, four groups were generated: low-performing non-NSLP students, high-performing non-NSLP students, low-performing NSLP students, and high-performing NSLP students.

Tables 1-3 show that student demographics, and school and home characteristics vary across the four groups. For example, 22 percent of high-performing NSLP students have more than 100 books at home, whereas 47 percent of high-performing non-NSLP students do so. Figures 1-3 focus on differences between low- and high-performing NSLP eligible students based on their perseverance, expectations of self and from others, their teachers’ expectations, and frequency of teachers’ assessments. The results show that high-performing NSLP students have strong perseverance (figure 1) and high expectations (figure 2) compared to low-performing NSLP students. The final paper also includes multilevel logistic regression analyses to examine if student and teacher expectations are associated with the probability of NSLP eligible students’ high performance, after controlling for student and school characteristics.

In summary, this study provides a snapshot of the characteristics of academically resilient students, their home, school, and teachers at the national level, and can contribute to our better understanding of what types of support would be helpful.

Author

• Saki Ikoma, American Institutes for Research