Analysis of National Education Longitudinal Studies Data

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

A four-year program of research is being undertaken to realize the analytic potential of two extraordinary education datasets: High School and Beyond and the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988. Taken together, these two datasets constitute the most extensive, richest body of information we have on the educational status of America's youth in relation to America's secondary schools. The scheduled program of research is intended to advance the social science use of this information through an interrelated set of substantive and methodological investigations which will, in a comparable and integral fashion, examine the learning experiences of high school seniors graduating in the years 1972, 1980, 1982, 1988, and 1992. The conceptual framework for the research is posited as an interactive system in which students' learning experiences and outcomes are affected by a web of reciprocal relationships among the educational activities of teachers, the student composition and social organization of classrooms, the administrative policies and structures of high schools, and the relationships of the parental community to both students and teachers. Attempts to disentangle strands of the web and uncover underlying processes will be made by use of sophisticated statistical modeling procedures which hold the promise of producing substantive gains of a basic social scientific kind as well as improving the metrics available for policy-related studies of formal schooling. The research includes provisions for devising and implementing a database management system that will organize and widen access to existing and forthcoming educational longitudinal datasets, improve access to and management of the growing body of statistical findings based upon longitudinal educational surveys, gain bibliographic control over publications related to data derived from such surveys, and make all of this available to future users of the data in media appropriate to modern computing environments. Funding for the research is being furnished by the Department of Education in addition to the National Science Foundation.