Publish at September 17 2015 Updated November 11 2023
Young people who drop out of high school face serious health and socio-economic consequences. Many measures are in place to prevent school dropout, but it's important to be able to apply them to those who need them...
Valid and effective screening tools, based on self-reported questionnaires, have long been developed to detect students most at risk of dropping out. Students are asked how they're doing (self-reported information), and no major difficulties are encountered with candid students, but for the distrustful, they won't be detected in this way.
It's difficult to identify the entire at-risk pool without including students who aren't at risk. To achieve this within realistic economic and practical parameters, the idea of using administrative information systematically recorded in students' files (school delay, failures, absenteeism, disciplinary actions) was worth analysing. In addition to representing important behavioral antecedents of dropping out, this data has the advantage of being available for all students and of being regularly updated. In addition, secure applications can be used to compile the information and produce clear reports accessible to school staff.
On the other hand, administrative data do not contain information on affective risk factors and therefore appear to be less sensitive than self-reported indices assessing these risks, in addition to behavioral aspects.
As few risk indices based on administrative data have been validated, the study consisted in comparing a self-reported index with an index based on administrative data.
The sample consisted of 1,557 students from two high schools in the same French-language school board, located in the Laurentians region near Montreal. One in a disadvantaged sector, the other in an average one.
The self-reported index was also compared with a sample of over 35,000 Quebec students. The administrative index was developed by school board staff, based on behavioral indicators recorded in school files.
The results show that the administrative index has a good discriminatory capacity, with adequate sensitivity and specificity. This simple, cost-effective instrument therefore appears valid in the sense that it provides information to help identify students at risk of dropping out. The results of the two screening tools also confirm the importance of adapting the cut-off point (the point at which intervention is decided) according to gender.
Normally inferior to self-reported indices, the predictive capacity of administrative indices proved superior to that of self-reported indices when longitudinal data (over several months or years) were considered. The evolution of school results over time seems particularly revealing.
Establishing a longitudinal risk index is a little more complicated than establishing an index based on a single point in time, but the investment is probably well worth it, since longitudinal administrative indices remain simpler to use than self-reported indices and, above all, are up-to-date.
As tools for compiling and processing large quantities of data become more popular, using data to detect at-risk students can help optimize the use of support resources and, overall, the performance of the school system.
Illustration: Lightspring, ShutterStock
Reference
School dropout screening using administrative or self-reported information
Vickie Gagnon, Véronique Dupéré, Isabelle Archambault and Michel Janosz, Université de Montréal, Eric Dion UQAM, François Léveillé and Marc St-Pierre Commission scolaire de la Rivière-du-Nord, Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science - 2015
https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/13409
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