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Project Overview
The UW-BHS (University of Washington-Beyond High
School) project is a study of educational attainment and the transition
to adulthood among over 9,600 students who were first interviewed in
the spring of their senior year in high school and followed-up one year
later. The primary goals of the study are to: 1) describe and explain
differences in the transition from high school to college by race and
ethnicity, socioeconomic origins, and other characteristics, 2)
evaluate of the impact of the Washington State Achievers Program on the
transition from high school to college, and 3) explore the implications
of multiple race and ethnic identities.
The first baseline UW BHS senior survey was conducted
in the spring of 2000 in five comprehensive high schools one district.
For students who were absent on the day of the survey as well as
students enrolled in alternative educational programs were contacted by
mail. The second baseline survey was conducted for the same set of high
schools in 2002.
By happenstance, a major educational initiative by the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, the “Washington State Achiever” (WSA) Program, was
introduced in three of the five high schools in 2001. These three high
schools are among the 16 low-income Washington State high schools to be
designated as “Achiever High Schools” by the Gates Foundation. The aim
of the WSA program is to encourage talented students from low income
families to attend college. The WSA program includes scholarships,
tutoring and school reform. Low income students in the targeted high
schools are eligible to apply for WSA scholarships. Recipients are
selected on the basis of academic promise, teacher recommendations, and
evidence of overcoming hardship.
Although the UW-BHS project was not originally designed
as an evaluation of the WSA program, the fortuitous research design is
a perfect natural experiment with both the intervention program
(Achiever High Schools) and a control (non-Achiever High Schools)
population. The research design also includes an important temporal
dimension. The first survey was conducted in 2000 before the program
began. The next two waves of the survey in 2002 and 2003 were the years
in which the scholarship program was introduced, and the final two
years of data collection in 2004 and 2005 witnessed the beginning of
the program of school reform.
In 2003, the UW-BHS project expanded from
5 high schools in one district to 9 public high schools in 3 districts
and 3 private high schools. The UW-BHS project has collected and
assembled a remarkable data archive for the study of the transition
from high school to college and beyond—the early life course of
adolescence and young adulthood. The comprehensive data file includes a
baseline survey conducted in high school and a follow up survey,
conducted one year after high school. For a subset of respondents,
there are linked high school records on courses and grades and
interviews with parents/guardians.
The baseline UW BHS senior survey covers about 200
items, including a broad range of questions on family background,
educational plans, perceptions of encouragement from teachers, peers
and family members, and standard scales to tap self-esteem,
self-efficacy, and other social psychological dimensions. Most of our
survey questions are drawn from the National
Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS) of the U.S. Department
of Education, but we also selected questions from the Wisconsin
Longitudinal Survey, the High School and Beyond Survey, the Children
of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey (Portes and Rumbaut 2001), the NORC General Social Survey, and the 2000
Population
Census. In accordance with the rules of the Office of
Human Subjects at the University of Washington, we obtained parental
approval for all students under age 18 and respondent approval for all
students above age 18. Since the survey was administered in late spring
to high school seniors, more than 75 percent of the students were over
age 18. For all students under age 18, we wrote a letter to
parents/guardians (with one follow-up letter) requesting permission to
survey their children. All parents received a letter from the PI about
a month before the survey informing them of the objectives and content
of the survey. Although the initial mail-back response for parental
consent was slow, we eventually managed to obtain a very high
participation of students (for both those under 18 and those over 18),
with special efforts on the day before (and the day of) each school
survey.
For each cohort of high school seniors, we administered
an in-school “paper and pencil” questionnaire in the spring (April or
May). In some schools, seniors completed the survey in regular
classrooms, while in other schools the students were assembled in an
auditorium to take the survey. Overall, student cooperation was very
good and less than 2 percent of enrolled seniors (or their parents)
refused to participate. In addition to in-school data collection, a
series of mailings were sent to “enrolled seniors” who were not present
in the school on the day of the survey following the Dillman (2000)
procedures to increase survey response. These additional mailings
increased the number of completed senior surveys from 10 to 15 percent.
Evaluation of the completeness of coverage of the
senior survey is clouded by the definition of who is a high school
senior, and the logistics of locating students who are nominally
registered as high school students, but are not attending school on a
regular basis. In theory, high school seniors are students who have
completed the 11 th grade, are currently enrolled in the 12 th grade,
and are likely to graduate from high school at the end of the year. In
practice, however, there are considerable variations from this standard
definition. Some students consider themselves to be seniors (and are
taking senior classes and are listed as seniors in the school
yearbook), but are classified in school records as juniors because they
have not earned sufficient credits. In addition to “fourth-year
juniors,” there are a number of “fifth-year seniors,” who didn’t
graduate on time and have returned to take one or two courses.
In addition to the problems of identifying the
potential universe of seniors, errors of coverage arise because about
10 percent of students are not enrolled in the five comprehensive high
schools in the district. In addition to a small number of home-schooled
students, there are a wide range of alternative programs for students
with academic, behavioral, or disciplinary problems. Because many of
these seniors have only a nominal affiliation with the public
schools—the largest group was enrolled in high school equivalency
courses at community colleges—they are less likely to respond to our
request to complete a survey of high school seniors. Even among
students enrolled in the five comprehensive high schools, there were
“non-mainstream” students who completed the survey at lower rates than
others, including the 6 percent of seniors who were taking community
college classes for college credit and another 7 percent of students
who were in special education classes for part or all of the school day.
The problems of defining senior status and locating
them (to take the survey) reduced the coverage of our senior survey.
For regular students – graduating seniors enrolled at and attending one
of the five major high schools—the response rate is about 80 percent.
If we consider a broader universe of students, including students with
marginal affiliation to high school and other hard to contact students,
our effective rate of coverage of all potential seniors is probably
about 70 percent. Although our rate of survey coverage of all high
school seniors is less than desirable, the problems we encountered are
endemic in survey research of high school students. Most national
surveys of students are limited to students who are present on the day
the survey is conducted and probably have even lower levels of coverage
than the UW-BHS senior survey. During data processing, we excluded a
small number of exchange students, developmentally disabled students,
self-reported Juniors, and a few students who appeared to have answered
the questionnaire with random responses or who could not be matched
with school records.
The one year follow up survey was conducted from
January to June in the year following high school graduation. We try to
contact every senior survey respondent by phone, email, and letter.
Through persistence and a very talented interviewing staff, we have
been able to contact and interview about 90 percent of the original
high schools respondents.
This website is dedicated the almost
10,000 high school seniors who have filled in UW-BHS questionnaires and
responded to our follow up survey. We are also grateful for the
cooperation of the administrators and teachers in our participating
schools. The UW-BHS project has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development.
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