Exploring the Relationship between the Application of School Uniform Policies and Third Grade Reading Achievement in United States Public Schools
I. Introduction
The motives for the implementation of dress code policies in United States public educational institutions have transformed since the earliest examples of the 19th century. In 1894, the announcement of uniform requirements for students at South Carolina’s Winthrop Normal and Industrial College was a push to eliminate sartorial distinctions among members of different social classes (Bodine, 2003). More recently, however, dress codes are applied for reasons relating to school safety and academic achievement. Beginning in the 1980’s dress codes have become more widely viewed as an institutional …show more content…
I created dichotomous indicators of the racial groups White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and other using the race variable in the data set and assigned a 1 if the student identified with a particular racial group and 0 if they did not. Parental education describes the highest level of education that the child’s parent has completed and is recorded within a categorical variable ranging from first grade to the completion of professional degree requirements. I coded the dummy variable for the nativity of the English language using the existing variable from the dataset where students who indicated that their native language was English were assigned a one while children who indicated that English is not their native language were assigned a 2. The new dummy variable assigns a 1 to the students who indicated that their native language is English and a 0 to student’s who did not. Prior achievement is a continuous predictor variable and was measured as a standardized t-score for the reading test administered during the spring term of 2000 when participants were enrolled in the first grade. Income is a categorical measure that indicates the range of total dollar amount a child’s household received in the year preceding the spring of 2002. Additionally, I created a new indicator variable for uniform policy engagement using the uniform variable which coded responses to the survey question, “Are third graders at this school required to wear uniforms?” Respondents were instructed not to include Researchers assigned a 1 to students who attended schools that required them to wear uniforms and a 2 to those who did not. The new uniform variable assigns different values 0 and 1 respectively to each student group.
The complete data set contains 5,387 observations, each containing data collected on a student with a complete information record free of missing values. Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics
I. Introduction
The motives for the implementation of dress code policies in United States public educational institutions have transformed since the earliest examples of the 19th century. In 1894, the announcement of uniform requirements for students at South Carolina’s Winthrop Normal and Industrial College was a push to eliminate sartorial distinctions among members of different social classes (Bodine, 2003). More recently, however, dress codes are applied for reasons relating to school safety and academic achievement. Beginning in the 1980’s dress codes have become more widely viewed as an institutional …show more content…
I created dichotomous indicators of the racial groups White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and other using the race variable in the data set and assigned a 1 if the student identified with a particular racial group and 0 if they did not. Parental education describes the highest level of education that the child’s parent has completed and is recorded within a categorical variable ranging from first grade to the completion of professional degree requirements. I coded the dummy variable for the nativity of the English language using the existing variable from the dataset where students who indicated that their native language was English were assigned a one while children who indicated that English is not their native language were assigned a 2. The new dummy variable assigns a 1 to the students who indicated that their native language is English and a 0 to student’s who did not. Prior achievement is a continuous predictor variable and was measured as a standardized t-score for the reading test administered during the spring term of 2000 when participants were enrolled in the first grade. Income is a categorical measure that indicates the range of total dollar amount a child’s household received in the year preceding the spring of 2002. Additionally, I created a new indicator variable for uniform policy engagement using the uniform variable which coded responses to the survey question, “Are third graders at this school required to wear uniforms?” Respondents were instructed not to include Researchers assigned a 1 to students who attended schools that required them to wear uniforms and a 2 to those who did not. The new uniform variable assigns different values 0 and 1 respectively to each student group.
The complete data set contains 5,387 observations, each containing data collected on a student with a complete information record free of missing values. Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics