The Impact of Outside Employment on Student Achievement in Macroeconomic Principles

Bonello and Attiyeh, Bach and Lamsden have studied the impact of different teaching methods on academic performance. The role of student attitudes in determining student performance has been analyzed in Karstensson-Vedder, and Ramsey, Johnson and Adams. The influence of age and sex has been studied by Lewis and Orvis. Both Yates and Allison have called for production function theories of learning which would study the impact on academic achievement of many different variables simultaneously. However, to the author's knowledge the research has not included a systematic empirical analysis of the association between learning in a given course and employment in an outside job. There are a number of relationships between these two variables that can be hypothesized. Perhaps the most obvious one is an inverse relationship between the amount of hours students are employed outside of school and student productivity in the classroom. This would be based on the idea that the more hours students work, the less time they could devote to their studies. A study by Wetzel shows a statistically significant inverse relationship between effort and hours worked. A second type of interaction is also possible. Some students may have a positive attitude toward their job because they receive personal satisfaction from their work. Other students may have a negative attitude toward their market position. They are working simply for the monetary reward. A positive relationship between attitude toward employment and scholastic performance seems reasonable. The student who finds his employment personally rewarding would have less need for leisure time. The purpose of this paper is to test statistically the two hypotheses concerning outside employment and student achievement in economic principles courses.