Eight Factors of Learning That Schools Can Influence

The Educational Testing Service, maker of many of the tests we use to measure student learning, has identified sixteen factors that influence student learning. So far, I’ve posted about seven of them. All are identified as “school factors”, meaning that schools have some control over them. They include curriculum rigor, teacher preparation, experience absence and turnover, class size, availability of technology, and fear and safety at school. One thing has become clear so far. Schools with minority populations and/or populations that are eligible for free of reduced lunch are negatively affected to a larger degree than schools that don’t have those populations. Since these are factors schools can affect, that raises a moral imperative to address the problem this discrepancy represents. An eighth factor, parent participation, is listed as having both a home and a school connection. I can relate to this issue, as it was part of my own public school experience 50 years ago. “White students’ parents are more likely to attend a school event or to volunteer at school. The gap in parents volunteering in schools remained unchanged; the gap in parents attending school events narrowed.” “The good news is that parent involvement showed an increase from 1999 to 2003, for all racial/ethnic groups. In addition, the racial/ethnic gap narrowed for attending a school event; it remained about the same for volunteering or serving on a committee. Similar data on trends by family income are not available.” This rounds out the eight factors that schools can affect. The remaining eight factors are beyond the control of schools. They include frequent changing of schools, low birth weight, environmental damage, hunger and nutrition, talking and reading to babies and young children, excessive television watching, parent-pupil ratio, and summer achievement gain/loss. I will post about them next week.