Meta-analysis of Risk for School Failure

说明(由申请人提供)：失学和相关问题不仅对经历过失学的儿童本身是不利的事件，而且还与随后青少年和成人的一系列负面后果有关。在这种情况下，为了选择和诊断需要补救服务的儿童，设计预防方案以抵消风险因素和加强保护因素，以及指导对造成不良学业成绩的因果过程的研究，确定和了解预测学校失败的风险因素尤为重要。 与这一问题相关的研究包括大量纵向研究，在这些研究中，衡量了学校成绩和先前的风险/保护变量。然而，还没有一篇综述论文、概念模型或系统综合利用这一研究文献的全部深度和广度来汇编、组织和分析其报告的经验关系。本项目的总体目标是利用先进的荟萃分析技术对这一研究机构进行系统的综合，以解决以下问题： 1.在不同年龄阶段观察到的风险和保护变量对日后学校成败的预测能力。这些变量的预测能力将根据关联的总体强度(乘积-矩相关性)和预测准确性(例如，灵敏度和特异度)进行检查。 2.不同年龄段倾向于同时出现的风险变量和保护性变量的组合，以及当组合在多变量因素中时，它们的集体预测能力的强弱。将特别注意经验数据与关于风险/保护因素与学校成绩之间关系的理论表述的趋同。 3.在不同年龄段，学业失败与其他问题行为(如外化和内化行为、物质使用)并存(共病)的程度。 4.风险/保护变量与学校成败之间预测关系的差异与学生的年龄、性别和种族有关。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): School failure and related problems are not only adverse events in their own right for the children who experience them, but are also related to a broad range of subsequent negative adolescent and adult outcomes. This circumstance makes it especially important to identify and understand the risk factors that predict school failure for purposes of selecting and diagnosing children in need of remedial services, designing preventive programs to offset risk factors and enhance protective ones, and guiding research on the causal processes that produce poor school outcomes. Research relevant to this issue includes a large number of longitudinal studies in which school outcomes and antecedent risk/protective variables are measured. However, no review paper, conceptual model, or systematic synthesis has yet drawn on the full depth and breadth of this research literature to compile, organize, and analyze the empirical relationships it reports. The overall aim of this project is to conduct a systematic synthesis of this body of research using advanced meta-analysis technique in order to address the following issues: 1. The capability of risk and protective variables observed during different age periods to predict school success or failure at later ages. The predictive ability of these variables will be examined in terms of the overall strength of association (product-moment correlation) and in terms of predictive accuracy (e.g., sensitivity and specificity). 2. The combinations of risk and protective variables that tend to co-occur during different age periods and the strength of their collective predictive ability when combined in multivariate factors. Particular attention will be paid to the convergence of empirical data with theoretical formulations about associations between risk/protective factors and school outcomes. 3. The extent of the co-occurrence (comorbidity) of school failure with other problem behaviors such as externalizing and internalizing behaviors and substance use at various age periods. 4. The differences in predictive relationships between risk/protective variables and school success/failure associated with the age, gender, and ethnicity of the students.