Defining Rural in Gifted Education Research

Abstract

Definitions of rurality in education research are inconsistent, making generalization across studies difficult at best. We review published research in rural education between 2005 and 2015 ( n = 17) and characterize the way each defined rural. A common technique for classifying rural schools is the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) locale code. We argue that the NCES locale codes fall short of most conceptual understandings of rural. We recommend a school size filter to address the mismatch between the NCES codes and conceptual understandings of rurality. We compare non-rural districts with rural districts using NCES codes for grouping with and without the school size filter. Observed effects vary depending on whether the school size filter was used. We argue that the school size filter along with NCES codes better captures the concept of rural education and could improve research design and generalization across studies involving rural schools.

Take Care When Cutting

“…In an earlier examination of district data, Kettler et al (2016) also raised concern about an unqualified embrace of the NCES's schema. They argued that simultaneous emphasis of the Urban-Centric codes on community-level population and urban proximity ignores a potentially relevant confound: student enrollment.…”

“…Although rurality has long been a "stepchild" to other education research pursuits (DeYoung, 1987, p. 140), geographic locale holds all the predictive promise of industry-standard contextual variables, such as race/ethnicity and socioeconomics (Kettler et al, 2015). For example, many studies of opportunity to learn advanced curricula, or high school students' access to college coursework, such as Advanced Placement (AP), negatively associate this equity-focused construct with rurality and/or remoteness (Gagnon & Mattingly, 2016;Kettler et al, 2016;Mann et al, 2017). Deficit thinking and overgeneralization limit understanding of programs for gifted students in rural and/or remote places, undermining research that aims for precise examinations of how demographic variables operate within rural and/or remote contexts (Azano et al, 2017).…”

“…Thus, we designed this study to answer calls for research that better taps into rurality and remoteness (Corbett, 2018;Greenough & Nelson, 2015;Kettler et al, 2016;Koziol et al, 2015;Puryear & Kettler, 2017). Exemplifying possibilities arising from one of many ways to operationalize rurality and remoteness-NCES's Urban-Centric codes-we have employed an outcome variable of wide-ranging importance for equity-focused gifted education policy: breadth of opportunity to learn AP content (specifically the number of AP courses that a school received College Board authorization to offer).…”

Failure to communicate : teachers talk to parents

“…Many rural schools are geographically isolated and high-quality research is lacking from rural settings making it difficult to identify interventions (Arnold et al, 2005). According to Kettler et al, (2016) what defines a rural community in relation to educational research is inconsistent, making generalizations across studies discrepant; however, a 2016 report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), asserts that rural populations encompass seventy percent of the world's poor and defines the term rural as settlements with fewer than ten thousand people where the space is dominated by either farmland, wooded areas, water, mountains, or deserts (UNESCO, 2016). The organization aims to help support rural education through a focus on streamlining curricula, providing better pay incentives for educators of rural school districts, and encouraging adequate data collection to help improve support systems for rural educational facilities.…”

“…The research of Kettler, Puryear, & Mullet (2016) explored empirical studies with an objective to identify the definitions of rural within others' research. This systematic review offered operational definitions from several different government and national agencies and highlighted seven of the seventeen studies reviewed failed to include a functional definition of rural.…”