Journalism Student Performance in Language Arts

School reform movements during the past 20 years have stimulated programs and tests that link newspaper reading, journalistic study and other media use with widely accepted educational objectives found in elementary, middle school, junior high school, high school and even collegiate language arts curricula.

One recent study (Dvorak, 1998) examines high school student performance on Advanced Placement (AP) English Language and Composition Examinations from 1989 through 1997. Specifically, it analyzes students who have taken an intensive journalistic writing course as preparation for the AP examination and compares their performance with those who have prepared for the same test by taking AP English composition or some other advanced high school English course.

For seven consecutive years, 1991 to 1997, the journalism students passed at a rate higher than that of the AP English Composition students. During the first two years students took tests as part of the program (1989 and 1990), the global pass rate was higher than the journalism pass rate. In only 1989, the first year of the experimental program, was the global pass rate significantly higher than the journalism pass rate.

In a Florida public school district, 17 teachers were trained in Newspaper in Education methods, and their junior high and senior high school students received newspapers from a local daily three times a week for a total of 55 days (Palmer, Fletcher & Shapley, 1994). Standardized tests in vocabulary and reading by Science Research Associates (SRA) were scored by SRA.

The Florida experiment compared three groups from pretest to posttest: Newspapers used as part of the instruction in language arts; newspapers available for students but with no formal instruction; and control groups in which no newspapers were delivered. Both middle- and senior-high students using newspapers improved more on all measures of reading and writing than did students taught with traditional materials (Palmer, Fletcher, & Shapley, 1994).

In another experiment, a program to help at-risk Native Alaskan high school students focused on training high school language arts teachers to teach journalism while also using newspaper production as a component in traditional English classes. Those students in the journalism experimental group showed significant gains over the control group in standardized vocabulary tests and in the writing components that were independently graded by language arts specialists (Morgan & Dvorak, 1994).

While these studies deal with use of newspapers in grades K through 12 and as parts of the language arts or general curriculum, other studies have examined specifically journalism student performance in secondary schools and beyond. Again, the evidence is decidedly positive when comparing various measures among those who have taken a course in journalism or worked on student media and those who have not.