Beyond Individual Differences: Exploring School Effects on SAT Scores

This article explores the complex, hierarchical relation among school characteristics, individual differences in academic achievement, extracurricular activities, and socioeconomic background on performance on the verbal and mathematics Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Using multilevel structural equation models (SEMs) with latent means, we analyzed data from a national sample of college-bound high school students. A nested series of SEMs were fit simultaneously to eight subgroups (disaggregated by both gender and ethnicity) of high school students. Our analyses suggest that (a) multilevel SEMs provide a reasonably good fit to the data, (b) family background influences SAT scores directly and indirectly, learning opportunities in and outside the school curriculum are related to SAT performance, and (c) the characteristics of the schools matter when it comes to performance on the SAT. We argue that context matters and that researchers ought to move beyond analyses of individual differences when attempting to understand performance on large-scale standardized tests.