Investing in at-risk middle-school students can be
profitable, showing a return in students' interest in
school, their grades and even their attendance. The
investment that paid off for eight Maryland schools is a
supplementary curriculum, Stocks in the Future, developed
in partnership with the Stocks in the Future Foundation at
the Center for Social
Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins.
The impact of this three-year course in the stock
market and investing — with an incentive program that
allows students to actually buy shares of stock — was
released last week during a session of the 2005 American
Education Researchers Association annual meeting in
Montreal.
"The Stocks in the Future program represents a new
approach to helping middle school students who are
reluctant to read, do math or attend school," said Douglas
J. MacIver, a principal researcher at the Johns Hopkins
center.
MacIver studied 195 sixth- and seventh-graders in
eight Maryland schools during the 2003-2004 school year. A
group of 221 students in those same schools who did not
take the course were used as a control group. The Stocks in
the Future students attended school an average of 3.2 days
more per year than students in the control group. That
means that over the three years of middle school, Stocks in
the Future students would attend two weeks more of classes
than the control students, MacIver noted. That much
improvement is statistically significant and "educationally
important," he said.
Furthermore, while these students were in school more,
they were also learning more, according to the results of
tests given to the two groups of students. Those who took
Stocks in the Future scored higher on vocabulary, reading
comprehension and applied math questions. The seventh-grade
vocabulary test produced the greatest gap between Stocks in
the Future students and the control group — 80
percent to 67 percent, respectively, of the answers
correct.
In surveys conducted in the Stocks in the Future
classes, students said they found the class exciting and
relevant and that they were willing to put forth a great
deal of effort because if they worked hard, they could
learn a lot.
"Every student understands the importance of money,"
MacIver said. "They may never figure out why they need to
know about the Magna Carta or the second law of
thermodynamics or how to diagram sentences, but they
immediately grasp that stock market literacy might help
them make wise investments, and thus make lifelong dreams
more attainable."
Such relevance makes the program an attractive
addition to the middle school curriculum, he said.
Stocks in the Future is a series of weekly lessons
designed to provide motivation and academic help to
students who are not making satisfactory progress in
academics and who have a history of poor attendance.
Students can earn the opportunity to buy stocks by
improving their grades and attendance. They can earn $1 for
each week of perfect attendance, $2 for improving math or
English grades each quarter, and $3 for each A and $2 for
each B in math or English on their report cards. These
funds are then used to buy stock, which the student can
cash out when he or she graduates from high school.
Other findings from the Stocks in the Future study
include:
Seventh-grade participants
outperformed the control students 72 percent to 62 percent
in correct answers on the overall test of math and language
skills.
Sixth-graders answered 72 percent
of the reading comprehension questions correctly, while
students in the control group scored 65 percent
correctly.
Both sixth- and seventh-grade
Stocks in the Future students showed the greatest
achievement gains on the reading comprehension portion of
the test.
In a survey of Stocks in the
Future students, 80 percent gave their teachers the highest
possible score for "doing everything he or she can to help
us learn."
Among other CSOS researchers presenting their research
and findings at the Montreal meeting were Jeffrey Wayman,
whose work focuses on the use of student data to help
educators determine appropriate instruction for their
students; Joyce Epstein, a leader in family and community
involvement in schools, who looked at how well schools and
school districts are meeting the requirements for parental
involvement in the No Child Left Behind Act; and Steven
Sheldon, who showed what factors over two years influence a
school's ability to set up the kind of partnerships No
Child Left Behind requires. These factors include strong
support from the principal and school district leaders, and
the existence of a team of teachers, parents and community
leaders that meets regularly and set goals for improving
its school.
The American Education Researchers Association is a
prominent international professional organization focusing
on the advancement of educational research and its
practical applications. More than 12,000 researchers,
educators and students attended the Montreal meeting.
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