Influences of School Environment on the Academic Achievement Scores of Adopted and Nonadopted Children

Associations between academic achievement and characteristics of the school environment can result from direct environmental influences of the school, or from placement of children into particular school environments based on prior ability. To disentangle these potential influences underlying school effects on children, we analyzed data from parents and first-grade adopted and nonadopted children in the Colorado Adoption Project. Measures analyzed included attending a private versus a public school, a variable aggregated at the school level, and several variables aggregated at the classroom level. If such aggregated measures are associated with many intercorrelated individual aspects of school environment, each having a small effect on achievement, the process of aggregation may offer additional power to detect these small individual environment effects. Several of these aggregate variables, in addition to measures of children's attitudes about school, showed direct environmental associations with reading and math achievement independent of effects of parental IQ.