Research shows that tall students get better test scores than short students
Previous research has shown that tall students tend to be higher-earning people after they enter society. A study examining the relationship between student grades, which have a significant impact on income, and height 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 is a well-known phenomenon in social science that taller men and women tend to earn more than shorter people in countries around the world,' say study authors Amy Ellen Schwartz, professor at the University of Delaware, and Stephanie Coffey, assistant professor at Saint Anselm College.
For example, in the United States and the United Kingdom, every 10 cm increase in height is associated with a 4-12% increase in weekly earnings, while in South Korea, every 10 cm increase in height is associated with a 6-7% increase in monthly earnings.
There are several hypotheses about this phenomenon. One of them is that it is related to social factors such as 'tall people are more confident' and 'tall people are more likely to be viewed 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 and standardized test scores in math and English for nearly 500,000 students enrolled in New York City public schools between 2010 and 2017, as well as data on obesity, attendance, gender, and race. This allowed the research team to examine the relationship between height and grades, as well as various factors that may affect this.
The study found a small but consistent association between height and academic achievement: for boys, each
While these numbers may seem small, this means that the tallest 2.5% of students in their grade performed 0.18 to 0.19 SD better in English than the shortest 2.5%.
'Our main finding is that taller people performed better in math and English across all grades from third to eighth grade,' Coffey explains. 'On average, the effects were not large, but they were significant enough to produce large achievement gaps between the tallest and shortest kids.'
Given that men are 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 the relative height difference between students and their classmates: Taller students performed slightly better on English tests, even when absolute height was taken into account.
'In essence, if you compare two kids of the same grade and height but attending different schools, based on our findings, kids who are taller than their classmates tend to have slightly higher English test scores than kids who are shorter than their classmates. This suggests that the social benefits of being tall may at least partly influence their grades,' Coffey explained.
Another aim of the study was to explore whether health could explain the relationship between height and academic achievement - that is, whether it is not height itself that influences academic achievement, but rather being healthy enough to grow taller.
To test this, the researchers took obesity into account and found that the relationship between height and academic achievement was actually stronger. They also tested 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 first analysis may not be explained by health status.
In addition, to test the possibility that factors such as home environment and childhood circumstances may have influenced both height and grades, the research team conducted analyses that took these fixed factors into account. The relationship between height and test scores was significantly weakened, but the relationship was still statistically significant.
In summary, this study found that height was directly related to grades, and that this relationship was influenced by social factors such as relative height difference between students and their classmates, as well as 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 grades.
Looking back at the study as a whole, Coffey said, 'What surprised us most was how strong the relationship between height and academic achievement was. We saw associations with both math and English achievement across all grade levels from third through eighth grade and across all racial and ethnic groups studied.'
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