Quarles Christopher L, Budak Ceren, Resnick Paul
School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Sci Adv. 2020 Jul 15;6(29):eaaz5954. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz5954. eCollection 2020 Jul.
Hundreds of thousands of students drop out of school each year in the United States, despite billions of dollars of funding and myriad educational reforms. Existing research tends to look at the effect of easily measurable student characteristics. However, a vast number of harder-to-measure student traits, skills, and resources affect educational success. We present a conceptual framework for the cumulative effect of all factors, which we call student capital. We develop a method for estimating student capital in groups of students and find that student capital is distributed exponentially in each of 140 cohorts of community college students. Students' ability to be successful does not behave like standard tests of intelligence. Instead, it acts like a limited resource, distributed unequally. The results suggest that rather than removing barriers related to easily measured characteristics, interventions should be focused on building up the skills and resources needed to be successful in school.
在美国，尽管投入了数十亿美元的资金并进行了无数次教育改革，但每年仍有成千上万的学生辍学。现有研究往往关注易于衡量的学生特征的影响。然而，大量更难衡量的学生特质、技能和资源会影响教育成就。我们提出了一个关于所有因素累积效应的概念框架，我们称之为学生资本。我们开发了一种方法来估计学生群体中的学生资本，并发现学生资本在140个社区大学生群体中呈指数分布。学生成功的能力并不像标准智力测试那样表现。相反，它就像一种有限的资源，分配不均。结果表明，干预措施不应着眼于消除与易于衡量的特征相关的障碍，而应专注于培养在学校取得成功所需的技能和资源。
