Efficacy
The efficacy of uniforms, in improving academic performance and student attitudes, is often debated.
A study published in The Journal of Educational Research by David L. Brunsma, of the University of Alabama, and Kerry A. Rockquemore, of the University of Notre Dame, states:
"The findings indicate that student uniforms have no direct effect on substance use, behavioral problems, or attendance. A negative effect of uniforms on student academic achievement was found."
In Vivian Gussin Paley's book, White Teacher, she discusses the need to embrace differences, not ignore them.
The cost of school uniforms can present a significant barrier to school attendance in developing nations. A randomized study by Evans et al. looked at the effect of school uniforms on Kenyan children's truancy and grades between 2001-2004. The project included giving school uniforms to children who could otherwise not afford one (and consequently may have suffered from various forms of stigma discouraging school attendance). The authors summarized that "giving a school uniform reduces school absenteeism by 44% for the average student, and 62% for students who did not previously own a uniform. The program also raised test scores for recipients by 0.25 standard deviations in the year after inception."
Read more about this topic: School Uniform
Famous quotes containing the word efficacy:
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)