COMMUNITY RISK AND PROTECTIVE CHARACTERISTICS ASSOCIATED WITH EARLY ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

Myah Brook Houghten

This dissertation examines the extent that community risk and protective characteristics are associated with school-wide early academic achievement, and how poverty influences those associations. The burden of poverty has been shown to hinder academic success but less is known about the added impact of social and behavioral risk and protective factors across multiple dimensions, or if those factors can shape child learning outcomes when aggregated together to represent characteristics of communities. To explore these relationships, empirical research literature and publicly available secondary education and public health data were used in three consecutive studies. The scoping review in Chapter 2 examined common approaches to conceptualizing and measuring community risk with aggregate secondary data. The study found that neighborhoods and schools were the most common types of community considered in community risk research and results identified three primary domains of risk—socioeconomic conditions, physical qualities and resource characteristics, and direct or indirect exposure to crime and violence. For the second study, presented in Chapter 3, multiple community-level risk scores were compiled from cumulative measures of youth experiences and perspectives aggregated at the community level, then linked as community characteristics to school district early academic achievement information. Multiple linear regression results revealed that, after accounting for poverty, each dimension of community-wide risk (youth, family, school, peer, and community) was directly associated with reduced third-grade math achievement. Further, moderated multiple regression results indicated four statistically significant risk-by-poverty interactions. When probed with communities grouped into three levels of poverty, results showed that community-wide risk did not affect achievement equally across poverty groups. The third study, presented in Chapter 4, used multiple linear regression to examine the association between community-wide protective factors and higher levels of achievement among third-grade students and the extent that community-wide protective factors retained a positive association when poverty was added to the analysis. Results indicated that community-wide youth, family, peer, and community protective factors were significantly associated with both third-grade achievement outcomes, but school protective factors were not. Results also show that poverty reduces the strength of association between each of the protective factor dimensions and achievement. The concluding chapter presents a summary of overall key findings and main contributions from the three studies and concludes with suggestions for potential future research. As a whole, the studies support the overarching hypotheses that community risk can suppress early academic achievement above and beyond the risk associated with poverty, and that community-wide protective factors can positively influence early academic achievement, but that poverty significantly dampens the positive impact of protective factors. Continued research that aligns with the complex and dynamic nature of community risk and protective factors will further contribute to what is known about community-wide factors and their interactions that support early academic achievement.

COMMUNITY RISK AND PROTECTIVE CHARACTERISTICS ASSOCIATED WITH EARLY ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

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