Cosmopolitan Environments and Adolescents' Gains in Social Studies

Diversity for diversity's sake? The relationship between diversity and school-level academic achievement.

“…While Blau et al (2001) more narrowly focused on the potential impact of neighborhood racial diversity on academic growth on social studies tests, the present study seeks to test an extension of this hypothesis: that students attending schools with greater socioeconomic diversity will have greater gains on reading and math tests. Recall and racial diversity on academic outcomes of students.…”

“…Blau, Lamb, Stearns, and Pellerin (2001) invoke the voice of Dewey (1859Dewey ( /1952 in their acknowledgement of the importance of social learning in educational outcomes. Based on the presumption that "student learning depends on what students experience and observe in their daily lives" (p. 121), Blau et al (2001) investigate the effect of neighborhood racial diversity on students' social studies test gains from grade 10 to 12.…”

“…Blau, Lamb, Stearns, and Pellerin (2001) invoke the voice of Dewey (1859Dewey ( /1952 in their acknowledgement of the importance of social learning in educational outcomes. Based on the presumption that "student learning depends on what students experience and observe in their daily lives" (p. 121), Blau et al (2001) investigate the effect of neighborhood racial diversity on students' social studies test gains from grade 10 to 12. They hypothesized that students attending schools in neighborhoods with no pronounced racial inequality, or cosmopolitan environments, would exhibit greater growth on social studies tests than students in neighborhood schools which exhibited greater racial inequality; a hypothesis confirmed by their analysis.…”

“…It follows that education institutions play an important role in perpetuating, or not, the reproduction of educational and life outcomes of the students they serve as "students with low SES bear the entire brunt of tracking system[s] in a way that they get poor academic result[s]" (Lam, 2014, p. 326). However, theories of diversity, or cosmopolitan environments (Blau et al, 2001) propose that students of low SES may benefit when diversity approaches evenness, or when the relative proportions of individuals representing different groups approach equality, also known as heterogeneity (Blau, 1977;Simpson, 1949).…”

“…Attention is given to conceptualizing socioeconomic diversity (Harrison & Klein, 2007), academic achievement (Labaree, 2010), and the relationship between SES and academic achievement (Blau, Lamb, Stearns, & Pellerin, 2001;Lam, 2014). The methodological approach selected to address the research questions are grounded in the literature that explores peer effects and hypotheses are informed by the work of Lam (2014) and theories of diversity, or cosmopolitan environments (Blau et al, 2001). These theoretical dispositions are articulated in the literature review, which is found in Chapter 2.…”