Good grades? It's all in who you know

[n2doc]

Published: Friday, June 4, 2010 - 01:46 in Psychology & Sociology
Enrichment classes, after-school activities, tutoring, not to mention the gentle prodding of parents — all may count in giving a child that extra academic edge. But parents still puzzle over what the right mix is to make their children excel in school. It turns out that the missing ingredient could be the friends a child keeps, specifically their in-school friends, the ones who sweat the same tests and homework and complain about the same teachers, rather than those they may make outside of school.

UCLA professor of psychiatry and senior study author Andrew J. Fuligni and first author Melissa R. Witkow, a former graduate student of Fuligni's, report in the online edition of the Journal of Research on Adolescence that adolescents with more in-school friends than out-of-school friends had higher grade-point averages and — complementing this finding — that those with higher GPAs had more in-school friends.

The authors found that these associations were similar for boys and girls and cut across all ethnic groups.


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http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/06/04/good.grades.its.all.who.you.know

[Davis_X_Machina]

1. In the schoolyard....

...basketball of my youth there was an expression "Play with shit, play like shit".

Seems to apply to more than hoops after all.

[JBoy]

3. Works like that for me in golf. If I play with duffers, I'll shoot 100. Play with scratch

golfers, I can shoot 90.

[wingnut40]

2. I know plenty of kids who got good grades because they were great at football or basketball.

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. This is very true

In urban schools we fight the notion that getting good grades is bad. We have a lot of kids who are bright enough to be honor students but are not because it's just not cool to get good grades. It's very frustrating.

[Catshrink]

5. Same here.

It's a suburban school but the peer stressors are still there.

[mbperrin]

6. Yes, here in west Texas, good grades are "acting white", and I try

really hard to keep attention on a skill set rather than the grade which automatically follows its mastery.

So strange to me, who was raised in the OTHER dysfunction: "Son, one of these grades is not an A. What are we going to have to do about that?"

[donco6]

7. We do too.

And we also fight the battle with parents over whether their kids will go to college or not. Had a kid get a FULL RIDE to Denver U. and parents had to be convinced to let her go. Mind-boggling.