Research shows that tall students get better test scores than short students
Previous research has shown that tall students tend to have higher salaries after entering the workforce. A study examining the relationship between height and grades during school, which has a significant impact on income, was published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Economics and Human Biology.
Towering Intellects? Sizing up the relationship between height and academic success - ScienceDirect
Taller students tend to perform slightly better in school, new research finds
https://www.psypost.org/taller-students-tend-to-perform-slightly-better-in-school-new-research-finds/
'It's a well-known phenomenon in social science that taller men and women earn more than shorter people in countries around the world,' say study authors Amy Ellen Schwartz, a professor at the University of Delaware, and Stephanie Coffey, an assistant professor at Saint Anselm College.
For example, in the US and the UK, a 10cm increase in height is associated with a 4-12% increase in weekly earnings, while in South Korea, a 10cm increase in height is associated with a 6-7% increase in monthly earnings.
There are several hypotheses proposed for this phenomenon. One of them is that it is related to social factors such as 'tall people are more confident' and 'tall people tend to be viewed more favorably by others.' Another theory is that there is actually a correlation between height and ability, meaning that it is ability, not height, that is valued in the labor market.
To investigate the relationship between academic achievement, an important factor that greatly influences annual income, and a child's height, Schwartz and his colleagues analyzed a dataset published by the New York City Department of Education.
The dataset included physical measurements of approximately 500,000 students enrolled in New York City public schools between 2010 and 2017, as well as standardized test scores in math and English, as well as data on obesity, attendance, gender, and race. This allowed the research team to examine the relationship between height and academic performance and various factors that may influence it.
The study found a small but consistent association between height and academic performance. Specifically, for boys, a one-
While these numbers may seem small, this means that the top 2.5% of students in their grade who are taller have English scores that are 0.18 to 0.19 SD higher than the shortest 2.5%.
'Our main finding is that taller children performed better in math and English at every grade level, from third to eighth grade. On average, the effect wasn't very large, but it was significant enough to produce a large achievement gap between the tallest and shortest children,' Coffey said.
Given that men tend to be more likely to be expected to be taller than women, the research team expected that the 'height premium,' or the advantage of height, would be greater for men, but the results showed very similar effects for both sexes.
In addition, the study found that it wasn't just absolute height that mattered, but also relative height differences between students and their classmates: Taller students performed slightly better on English tests, even when absolute height was taken into account.
'In essence, based on our findings, when comparing two children of the same grade and height but attending different schools, children who are taller than their classmates have slightly higher English test scores than children who are shorter than their classmates. This suggests that the social benefits of being tall may at least partly influence academic performance,' Coffey explained.
Another aim of the study was to explore whether health could explain the relationship between height and academic achievement, i.e., whether it is not height itself but rather health that allows children to grow taller that influences their academic performance.
To test this, the researchers took obesity into account and found that the relationship between height and academic achievement was actually stronger. They also examined whether taller students were less likely to be absent from school, but found little evidence that absenteeism was an important factor. This means that the association between height and academic achievement seen in the initial analysis may not be explained by health status.
To test whether factors like family environment and childhood circumstances might influence both height and academic performance, the research team also conducted analyses that took these fixed factors into account. The relationship between height and test scores was significantly weaker, but the relationship remained statistically significant.
In summary, this study found that height was directly related to academic performance, and that this relationship was influenced by social factors such as relative height difference with classmates and fixed factors such as home environment. However, it was found that health factors such as obesity and absenteeism did not explain the relationship between height and academic performance.
Looking back at the study as a whole, Coffey said, 'What surprised us most was how robust the relationship between height and academic achievement was. We saw associations in both math and English achievement across all grade levels from third through eighth grade and across all racial and ethnic groups studied.'
Related Posts:
