On the Move: New Research Explores How Mobility Impacts Achievement Among Younger Students

Last month, researchers gathered at the National Academies of Science to share new research on how often students change schools, why they do it and how becoming “the new kid” can impact their academic achievement, especially in the elementary school years.

In one paper presented at the conference, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan used data from the ECLS-K, a national dataset, to demonstrate that children who change schools between kindergarten and third grade (for reasons other than that the school didn’t offer the next grade) perform worse than their peers in reading and math in this period. Negative effects were particularly apparent among special education students and students who moved multiple times in those early elementary school years.

While the impact of mobility on a child’s academic achievement should not be overstated (the Michigan study found most impacts to be slightly negative), changing schools is an increasingly common experience among young children.

American students are in fact the most mobile in the industrialized world. The University of Michigan researchers found that by the time children in their dataset reached third grade, only 55 percent were still in the same school where they began kindergarten. Mobility rates were higher among students from low-income families, minority groups and those who live in urban areas.

Another paper presented at the conference, a meta-analysis by researchers University of Minnesota led by Arthur Reynolds, found that frequent mobility (moving three or more times) in grades K-12 was associated with significantly higher rates of high school dropout.

David Burkham, a co-author of the University of Michigan study, said that researchers are only beginning to understand the context and impact that all this moving around has on academic achievement. “This is a far more complicated question than most people even realize,” he said. “Mobility is not a single experience.”

For young children, moving does not just mean putting a beloved teddy bears into cardboard boxes and finding their way to a new classroom in a new school. When the child enters that new classroom, he or she must adjust to a new environment and a new set of expectations and curricula — all changes that can lead to gaps in what they learn over time. Moving also disrupts social networks, leading children to feel isolated and alone.

Researchers are searching for ways to integrate qualitative data like parent interviews and observational measures of classroom quality with richer data on family characteristics to get a better picture of the magnitude of the changes inherent in the child’s move. “It is not about whether or not the kid moves, yes or no,” Burkham said. “It is, what is the kid moving from and what is the kid moving into?”

Burkham, Reynolds and their colleagues emphasized that some moves can actually be good for children if they are going into a better school or moving into a better neighborhood or to be closer to family – two ecological factors that contribute overall child development. Most school moves, however, are not motivated by the child’s education experience, Burkham said. Student mobility may result from something as bad as a family being evicted from their home, or, as is common among middle-class families, because one parent got a new job.

Research has begun to show how mobility can be disruptive for teachers and non-mobile students too. A 2003 study of classrooms in Chicago found that the curricular place was slower – behind by as much as a year in some subjects – in schools with high rates of student mobility. This is because teachers need to re-teach material when a new student arrives in the classroom, or teach to the lowest common denominator when beginning in the fall with a classroom of children with different educational backgrounds.

The irony is that in most longitudinal research studies – say, a study tracking achievement of pre-k graduates through third grade – it is standard procedure to eliminate students who move in or out of the school or district during the time period in question. While this disregard of “mobile students” has valid methodological reasons, it means that the students are invisible to most research on achievement.

Burkham and his colleagues argue that these students are largely invisible to policymakers, too. There is an “implicit assumption” when creating new policy, they write in their paper, “that the initiative or activity will be implemented and have an influence on a constant population of students.”

Of course, it makes no sense to try to prevent mobility – life happens. So we need to think systematically about how to better support students as they make the transition from one school to another. Some schools have special transition programs for new arrivals or peer buddy programs to help them make friends at school. But we need to go farther.

The Department of Defense, which operates 192 schools around the world for children in military families, offers a good model that emphasizes curriculum continuity as a way to insure academic progress among a student body that changes schools as frequently as every year.

In the early grades in particular, PreK-3^rd alignment (standardization of curricula and expectations) across multiple preschools and schools in a district can help minimize the effects of moving. In their paper presented at the conference, Reynolds and his colleagues wrote that the PreK-3rd model is especially promising because of its emphasis on programs to support consistency across these grades and because it creates an organizational structure to coordinate and integrate services among different teachers and schools.

But to date, most PreK-3rd efforts are concentrated at the district level, which can be a problem for mobile students. Last spring, I visited a school in Montgomery County, a district with one of the most impressive district-wide Prek-3rd models in the country. But the assistant principal told me that some of his school’s greatest challenges come from the many students who transfer to his school from nearby Prince George’s County Public Schools; Washington, DC; and countries around the world.

This means that we need better state- and federal-level coordination in addition to district-led efforts. As states work to beef up their early childhood education programs and related standards, this new mobility research is a reminder of the importance of aligned programs and standards on many levels for the nation’s increasingly itinerant student population.