Study Offers Method for Improved Academic Performance

Researchers have developed unique written classroom exercises that are designed to improve the academic performance of minority middle school students. Credit: © 2011 Jupiter Images Corporation

Professors from several universities have joined together to develop a set of classroom exercises which are designed to improve the academic performance of minority middle school students. The goal is to reduce the racial achievement gap in core academic disciplines.

The program, developed by Geoffrey Cohen of Stanford University, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns of Columbia University, and Julio Garcia and David Sherman of University of California, Santa Barbara, employs what they refer to as an “intervention strategy” including various writing exercises that focus on students’ core personal values.

The study is based on data collected from 120 middle school students over the course of a year in Connecticut and Colorado. “What we have found is that a corrective intervention strategy helps to reduce the student achievement gap in general,” said Cohen.

The team is targeting middle school because that appears to be a time in children’s lives when their “sense of belonging in school declines…maybe the things they value aren’t valued at school and maybe reflecting on these brings a greater sense of belonging,” said Cohen.

The students were given value statements with which they were asked to identify as being important to them and explain why as part of an exercise. The exercise improved participating student’s grades by about 0.2-0.3 points on a standard grade point average scale in core subjects such as math, science, social studies and English.

While the results appear to be promising, Cohen and his team are still working on additional projects to further assess the value of the values exercises. “We’re still collecting long-term data to look at the duration of the effects,” said Cohen. “We’re under no illusion that [this intervention] is a silver bullet.”