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. 2014 Mar;25(3):736-44.
doi: 10.1177/0956797613516008. Epub 2014 Jan 16.

Cognitive skills, student achievement tests, and schools

Amy S Finn  1 , Matthew A Kraft, Martin R West, Julia A Leonard, Crystal E Bish, Rebecca E Martin, Margaret A Sheridan, Christopher F O Gabrieli, John D E Gabrieli
Affiliations

Cognitive skills, student achievement tests, and schools

Amy S Finn et al. Psychol Sci. 2014 Mar.

Abstract

Cognitive skills predict academic performance, so schools that improve academic performance might also improve cognitive skills. To investigate the impact schools have on both academic performance and cognitive skills, we related standardized achievement-test scores to measures of cognitive skills in a large sample (N = 1,367) of eighth-grade students attending traditional, exam, and charter public schools. Test scores and gains in test scores over time correlated with measures of cognitive skills. Despite wide variation in test scores across schools, differences in cognitive skills across schools were negligible after we controlled for fourth-grade test scores. Random offers of enrollment to oversubscribed charter schools resulted in positive impacts of such school attendance on math achievement but had no impact on cognitive skills. These findings suggest that schools that improve standardized achievement-test scores do so primarily through channels other than improving cognitive skills.

Keywords: adolescent development; childhood development; cognition; cognitive development; educational psychology.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Mean Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) scores by school type. Scores are plotted for students overall (dark bars) and students in study sample (light bars), separately for Math (a) and English language arts (ELA) (b). MCAS scores were standardized by subject, grade, and year to have mean zero and unit variance in the population of students attending Massachusetts public schools. Error bars represent plus/minus one standard error of the mean.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Variance explained by schools for 8th-grade MCAS scores and cognitive measures of processing speed (PS), working memory (WM), fluid reasoning (FR), and composite cognitive measure (Composite). Percentage of school-level variance for each outcome was calculated using ANOVA with different controls: controlling for student demographics and 4th-grade MCAS scores across all measures (a), controlling for demographics and 4th-grade MCAS score for all outcomes and the composite cognitive measure for test scores (Math and ELA) and 8th-grade MCAS scores (Math and ELA) for cognitive measures (PS, WM, FR, Composite) (b), controlling for demographics for all outcomes and the composite cognitive measure for test scores (Math and ELA) and 8th-grade MCAS score for cognitive measures (PS, WM, FR, Composite) (c), and controlling for student demographics and 4th-grade MCAS scores across all measures, but excluding students from exam schools (d).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Estimated impact of one year’s attendance at an over-subscribed charter school. Quasi-experimental estimates (based on random offer of admission) depict the effect of each additional year of charter attendance on MCAS scores and cognitive skills. Error bars represent plus/minus one standard error of the estimated effect.
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References

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