This story originally appeared on the University of Memphis’ Center for Community Research and Evaluation’s (CCRE) Substack and website. You can find it here.
A new research collaboration between CCRE, Delta Health Alliance (DHA), Mississippi State University, and Urban Institute’s Student Upward Mobility Initiative highlights the role that middle school life skills play in fostering academic success and college readiness.
The study pairs data collected through DHA’s interventions with academic and economic mobility data available in Mississippi’s state longitudinal data system through a partnership with NSPARC, a research center at Mississippi State University. The study examines the significance of life skills competencies in early adolescence on academic and economic outcomes later in life. The study, currently under peer review at the Educational Researcher, finds that students with stronger life skills competencies in grades 7-9, are
- 150% more likely to be proficient on the English II exam in tenth grade
- 64% more likely to be proficient in Algebra I.
The study also finds that self-control skills, reflecting students’ ability to persevere against adversity, improves academic proficiency, and may have increased the prospects of enrolling in college by up to 20%.
The research findings “contribute to a growing corpus of evidence linking non-cognitive competencies to later measures of economic mobility”, said Dr. Rachel Arthur, lead evaluator of Promise Communities programming at the University of Memphis, Center for Community Research and Evaluation (CCRE), which supported the study. According to Dr. Arthur, this project “is one of few studies that examines long term student outcomes using contextually sensitive, school-based metrics.” Dr. Wesley James, DHA’s external evaluator and executive director of the CCRE, said that the study “uniquely connects Promise Neighborhoods data with other data sources to inform our understanding of economic mobility.”
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