F. David Boulanger

Probing a Model of Educational Productivity in Science with National Assessment Samples of Early Adolescents

To test a psychological theory of educational productivity and to explore the usefulness of the National Assessment of Educational Progress data for secondary analysis for policy purposes, the science achievement scores of 2,346 13-year-old students were regressed on indexes of their Socio-economic Status, Motivation, Quality (of instruction), Class (social psychological environment), and Home conditions. All these productivity factors are significant in the ordinary multiple regressions when controlled for one another and Race and Gender, and the equation coefficients conform closely in sign and magnitude to theoretical values derived from the Cobb-Douglas theory of national economic productivity. Under a stringent probe, however, the Class social-psychological environment appears as the only unequivocal cause of science learning in the data.