Stanford Study: The Most Religious Kids Do Best in School
Adolescents who practice religion regularly perform better in school than those adolescents who do not, finds a recent study performed by Dr. Ilana M. Horwitz at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Horwitz’s paper explores differences among the grade point averages (GPAs) of public school students based on their levels of religiosity.
Horwitz bucketed the students into five different levels of religious adherence, from most religious to least religious: Abiders, Adapters, Assenters, Avoiders, and Atheists. She found the most religious kids had the highest GPAs. Horwitz defines that group, the “Abiders,” as those who “display high levels across all measured dimensions of religiosity and ‘abide’ by religion in a classic, institutional sense,” while Avoiders, true to their nomenclature, “avoid religious involvement and broader issues of the relevance of religion for their life.” Unlike the Atheist group, they believe in G-d, but participate far less in religious ceremonies and prayer.
Horwitz’s paper focuses exclusively on the “Abider-Avoider” achievement gap, noting that Abiders outperform all the other religious groups, with the exception of Atheists, who performed comparable with Abiders, although the Atheist group size was very small, which affects its reliability. Atheists comprised 3 percent of Horwitz’s sample, and Horwitz makes no conjectures regarding their achievement metrics, saying they are a unique subset of students who most likely differ greatly from their other non-religious counterparts, given the “strong social stigma” attached to claiming G-d does not exist. Therefore, Horwitz directs her research primarily on the remaining four categories, exploring the relationship between varying levels of religious commitment and its impact on academic performance.
Horwitz discovered that “Abiders report the highest GPAs while Avoiders report the lowest GPAs, even after controlling for a host of background factors and behaviors.” Based on her own religious research, Horwitz believes religion nurtures two qualities rewarded heavily in school curriculums: “conscientiousness” and “cooperation.” Conservative Protestants comprised the largest religious type within the high-achieving Abiders group, which “run[s] counter to the hypothesis that Conservative Protestants fare worse in terms of academic achievement,” Horwitz wrote. . .
Horwitz found that, within each income bracket, Abiders consistently received better grades than Adapters, Assenters, and Avoiders did, while the GPA gap between Abiders and Avoiders was most pronounced. Even after controlling for a host of factors, including “Gender, race/ethnicity, family socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, and region of the country,” Abiders had an average GPA of 3.21, while Avoiders had just a 2.92 GPA. Even more interestingly, Horwitz found that, after instating the same controls, this effect of religiosity on student grades was most profound for middle-income families and least impactful for high-income families. (Read more from “Stanford Study: The Most Religious Kids Do Best in School” HERE)
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