An intervention approach to building social capital: effects on grade retention

Fiel, Jeremy E.; Shoji, Megan; Gamoran, Adam

doi:10.4337/9780857935854.00019

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Of course, this is neither feasible nor desirable. Instead, we adopted an intervention approach by randomly assigning schools to an intervention that strengthens relations among families within schools (Fiel, Shoji, and Gamoran 2015). The school-based intervention provides an exogenous “shock” to social capital that is independent of preexisting relationships among families and prior levels of student academic performance.…”

Section: Research Questions Study Design and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Data for third-grade achievement are available only for students who reach third grade two years after first grade and are attending school in their original district. Any students who were retained in first or second grade would have missing data on third-grade achievement, yet retention may be endogenous to the intervention (Fiel et al 2015). The selection model adjusts for missing third-grade test scores.…”

Section: Research Questions Study Design and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Social Capital and Student Achievement: An Intervention-Based Test of Theory

Gamoran

Miller²,

Fiel

et al. 2021

Sociol Educ

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Social capital is widely cited as benefiting children’s school performance, but close inspection of existing research yields inconsistent findings. Focusing on intergenerational closure among parents of children in the same school, this article draws from a field experiment to test the effects of social capital on children’s achievement in reading and mathematics. When children were in first grade, their schools were randomly assigned to an after-school family-based intervention that boosts social capital. A total of 52 schools in Phoenix, Arizona, and San Antonio, Texas, containing over 3,000 first graders, participated in the study, with half the schools in each city assigned to the treatment group and half serving as no-treatment controls. Two years later, no differences in third-grade achievement were evident between children who had been in treatment schools versus control schools. By contrast, nonexperimental analyses of survey-based measures of social capital suggest positive effects on achievement, indicating that naïve estimates based on survey measures may be upwardly biased by unobserved conditions that lead to both stronger ties among parents and higher test scores. This article adds to a growing literature that raises doubts about the effects of this type of social capital for achievement outcomes among young children.

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Section: Research Questions Study Design and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Research Questions Study Design and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%