| Christopher Weiss
Columbia University
Student engagement in small schools: The effects on academic achievement
FINAL REPORT
n an effort to increase both adolescents' engagement with school and academic achievement, school districts across the United States have created small high schools. This policy shift overlooks two essential organizational mechanisms in the lives of adolescents as they experience the latter part of secondary schooling: psychological theories of formalization and peer group effects. In response, this paper employs a composite measure of engagement, combining organizational, sociological and psychological theories. We use this composite measure with the most recent nationally-representative dataset of 10th graders, ELS: 2002, to better assess a generalizable relationship among school engagement, mathematics achievement and school size with specific focus on cohort size. Findings confirm the measures to be highly related to their intended measure of student engagement. Furthermore, results derived from multilevel regression indicate that, like with school size, moderately sized cohorts provide the greatest engagement advantage for all students and that there are potentially harmful changes when cohorts grow beyond 400 students. However, it is important to note that each group size affects different students differently eliminating the ability to prescribe an ideal cohort or school size.
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