Big School, Small School: (Re)Testing Assumptions about HighSchool Size, School Engagement and Mathematics Achievement

摘要

In an effort to increase both adolescents'engagement with school and academic achievement, schooldistricts across the United States have created small highschools. However, despite the widespread adoption of sizereduction reforms, relatively little is known about therelationship between size, engagement and outcomes inhigh school. In response, this article employs a compositemeasure of engagement that combines organizational,sociological, and psychological theories. We use thiscomposite measure with the most recent nationally-repre-sentative dataset of tenth graders, Educational LongitudinalStudy: 2002, (N = 10,946, 46% female) to better assess ageneralizable relationship among school engagement,mathematics achievement and school size with specificfocus on cohort size. Findings confirm these measures to behighly related to student engagement. Furthermore, resultsderived from multilevel regression analysis indicate that, aswith school size, moderately sized cohorts or grade-level groups provide the greatest engagement advantage for allstudents and that there are potentially harmful changeswhen cohorts grow beyond 400 students. However, it isimportant to note that each group size affects differentstudents differently, eliminating the ability to prescribe anideal cohort or school size.