Evaluation of a college readiness program in Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools

Jason Brandon Smith, Tennessee State University

Abstract

This study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program in Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) during the 2012-2013 school year by comparing college entrance scores, grade point averages, and college acceptance rates between graduating seniors participating in the AVID program and those graduating seniors who did not participate in the AVID program. The choice of an enrichment curriculum to increase student ACT test scores, overall high school GPA, and college acceptance rates is an imperative for all American educational institutions across the country. In 2004, school administrators in MNPS implemented the AVID Program in the seventeen high schools in the district expecting higher achievement in the major areas evaluated by the Tennessee Department of Education. Participants formed two groups (AVID or non-AVID) according to the number of AVID courses listed on a student's transcript. The data for the research was taken from 2,624 students that met the criteria for the research model. The AVID students consisted of 520 seniors and the non-AVID students consisted of 2,104 seniors in the MNPS class of 2012-2013. Statistical analyses included independent samples t-tests, ANOVAs, and Chi-Square; all of which were employed to test the null hypotheses. It was found that no statically significant differences were found between the groups of AVID students and non-AVID students.

Subject Area

Educational evaluation|School administration

Recommended Citation

Jason Brandon Smith, "Evaluation of a college readiness program in Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools" (2014). ETD Collection for Tennessee State University. Paper AAI3636318.
https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/dissertations/AAI3636318

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