File this one under: Depressing, but we suspected it all along. The Washington Post ran a summary of research that looked at the link between school achievement and physical appearance.
A new study finds that good looking kids do better in school than their less striking peers.
The research, by Barnard College economist Daniel Hamermesh and colleagues, finds that people whose looks are “one standard deviation above average” attain nearly five more months of schooling than an “otherwise identical average-looking individual.”
The study in question found the effect in two large, national studies, one in the U.S. and one in the U.K. You might be wondering, how did they decide how good looking the kids were? What do you think of the construct validity of this operationalization:
For each kid in the American study, looks were assessed by a panel of at least 10 undergraduates who watched segments of video interviews with the children collected over the course of the survey. The raters assessed each one’s looks on a scale from 1 (not at all cute/very unattractive) to 5 (very cute/very attractive).
For the U.K. study, attractiveness was assessed by the children’s teachers, who assigned each child to one of four categories: attractive, unattractive, “abnormal feature” or “underfed or scruffy and dirty.”
Here is a description of the results:
Ratings in hand, the researchers then analyzed the relationship between a child’s looks and academic achievement, as measured via various standardized tests administered throughout the two studies. The studies revealed the same general pattern: Better looking children performed better on tests of academic achievement, even when controlling for ethnicity, gender and parents’ education and income.
The language above should cue you to realize that this study evaluated the core relationship (between looks and achievement) but used multiple regression techniques to control for these potential internal validity threats.
a) What is the criterion variable in this study? What are the predictor variables?
b) Sketch a little regression table with results that would be consistent with what is mentioned above. Put the criterion variable at the top, and list the predictor variables. Which betas would be significant here?
(Note: You can see the actual results in Table 7 of the scientific article.)
The journalist continues the summary with this statement:
Economists who’ve studied academic performance have found that children who perform better on tests tend to get more schooling: A student who aces all her reading and math tests is much more likely to go on to college than one who does not. Hamermesh and his colleagues estimate that good-looking kids’ heightened test performance relative to their average-looking peers works out to about 0.4 years, or five months, of additional schooling.
c) The above is a statement about effect size. Do you think this effect is a large one? Is it important? What more do you need to know to evaluate this effect?
d) Next comes a statement about potential mediators of the relationship. Read the following and sketch out one of the mediation paths they are describing (use Figure 9.11 as a model)
To determine why, Hamermesh and his colleagues tested a number of theories. They found some evidence that teachers report better relationships with the more attractive students, which explains some of the achievement gap. They also found that youngsters rated as unattractive were somewhat more likely to report being bullied by their peers, with detrimental spillover on their academic performance.
