Old 10-08-2009, 07:32 AM
ilbegone ilbegone is offline
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Summary and Conclusions to the essay Why Students Drop Out of School: A Review of 25 Years of Research from The California Drop Out Research Project
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The longstanding and widespread interest in the issue of high school dropouts has generated a vast research literature, particularly over the last ten years. The purpose of this study was to identify and review this literature. Restricting our focus to research studies published in scholarly journals found in the nation’s largest scientific database yielded 203 studies that have been published over the last 25 years, involving 387 separate analyses. To organize our review, we developed a conceptual framework that identified all the key factors that the research has identified as salient to understanding how, when, and why students drop out of high school.
These factors had to do with characteristics of individual students—their educational performance, behaviors, attitudes, and backgrounds—as well as the characteristics of the families, schools, and communities where they live and go to school. The review verified that indeed, a number of salient factors within each of these domains are associated with whether students drop out or graduate from high school. Although most of the studies were unable to establish a strong causal connection between the various factors and dropping out, they nonetheless suggest such a connection.
We learned a number of things from this review. The first is that no single factor can completely account for a student’s decision to continue in school until graduation. Just as students themselves report a variety of reasons for quitting school, the research literature also identifies a number of salient factors that appear to influence the decision. Second, the decision to drop out is not simply a result of what happens in school.
Clearly, students’ behavior and performance in school influence their decision to stay or leave. But students’ activities and behaviors outside of school—particularly engaging in deviant and criminal behavior—also influence their likelihood of remaining in school.
http://cdrp.ucsb.edu/dropouts/pubs_reports.htm