| John Latting
UC Berkeley
Academic achievement as behavior: A study of effective approaches to secondary education
FINAL REPORT:
This dissertation is an attempt to find an answer to the question: what is a good school? Chapter 1 summarizes thirty years of research, focusing on a group of researchers who have defined the test for "goodness" in educational institutions as a function of their academic outcomes (termed "school effectiveness" or "school effects"). Chapter II identifies school characteristics associated with achievement by developing a perspective on behavior generally, and student achievement specifically. Chapter III demonstrates that the choice perspective developed in the earlier chapters is useful in accounting for the hehavior observed in a large sample of secondary school students. The choice model was operationalized using several measures of student preferences for education, and student judgements about the likelihood of desired ends being met by his or her efforts. Chapter III concludes with the assertion that a key tool in the effort to increase student academic achievement is the manipulation of student choice. Chapter IV investigates whether schools have such a tool at their disposal, and the extent to which student choice is influenced by school characteristics. The results suggest that there are a number of school characteristics that do affect the choices about education that students make. The concluding chapter discusses a set of directions for secondary school policy, rather than a set of fixed characteristcs of the "effective school".
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