In the struggle to keep students from dropping out of school, UGA researchers are finding that how students view time and rewards plays a role in why some students quit on their educations.
“It is so well known that it is a cliché: To get a good job, you need a good education,” said Jeff Jordan, a professor in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. “Yet more than one-third of children do not graduate from high school.”
For the 2007-2008 school year, Georgia’s dropout rate was 22 percent, or 18,960 students. Of those, 8,711 were removed for lack of attendance, 6,078 dropped out because of other adult education, 1,406 were expelled and 1,330 dropped out for unknown reasons, according to the Georgia Department of Education.
The rate is slightly lower than the previous year, but Georgia still ranks in the bottom five states for dropouts nationally.
Along with researchers from Georgia State University and Georgia Tech, Jordan has studied Spalding County eighth graders since 2005. He’s collected data on 1,300 students to try to figure out their time preferences, something he calls student discount rates.
How a student views the future is one of the key reasons some students drop out.
Jordan and his colleagues chose to study eighth graders because “most kids finish elementary school still engaged,” he said. “It’s that time in middle school that those who drop out become disengaged.”
“What research is showing is that we lose kids earlier than we thought we did. They are often present physically, but not present emotionally—they are not engaged,” said Sharon Gibson, a UGA Cooperative Extension multicultural specialist.
In Georgia, students can drop out when they’re 16. The average eighth grader is 13–15.
Jordan, an agricultural economist, uses money to study how long students are willing to wait. In 2008, the group surveyed eighth graders at four Spalding middle schools to see whether they would rather have the money now or if they would be willing to wait for a few months for more.
In each of the classes they studied, they gave three students gift cards in the amount they chose—$49 for students who indicated they wanted the money now and up to $98 if they were willing to wait longer for more.
The research shows that black boys have significantly larger discount rates than any other demographic group, a finding that may indicate these students have a different view of the future, Jordan said.
“They tend to view positive outcomes as less likely and negative as more likely,” he said.
Kids who live in high-stress environments often find it difficult to believe something good could happen to them, even when it’s happening.
“If all you’ve seen is negative, negative, negative, and all you hear is negative, negative, negative, then the expectation is that of ‘when is the other shoe going to fall?’ ” Gibson said.
Jordan also found that discount rates predict the likelihood that a student will have above-average disciplinary referrals. And his research has found something else—reward-based reinforcement isn’t necessarily the best way to get engage kids.
“All the research that has been done on these kinds of incentive systems shows that they make things worse,” he said. “ ‘Good’ kids get the rewards, and the kids who aren’t getting good grades and are falling behind aren’t. The way our system is set up, it widens the gap between high- and low-achieving kids.”
In part because of his research, the four schools have incentive-based systems in place. These incentives have shorter time periods between rewards and more sequential rewards.
Last summer, Jordan started looking at fourth graders and kindergartners to pinpoint when students lose interest in school.
Gibson is closely following Jordan’s research and hoping that her outreach efforts will benefit from his findings. Through a USDA Children, Youth and Families at Risk Sustainable Community Projects grant, she focuses on rural communities to engage and empower youth to “be the change they want to see in the world,” she said.