Religious Engagement

A new study from Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) shows that adolescents who practice religion regularly do better in school than their religiously disengaged peers. The manner in which the students are involved in religion is known as religiosity. Based on the findings, religious communities teach adolescents to cultivate cooperation and conscientiousness, two habits highly valued in public schools, which may help improve grades more than researchers realize.

According to GSE doctoral candidate and author of the study Ilana Horwitz, religion is a powerful force in the U.S and therefore education scholars should pay close attention to this vital part of adolescents’ life if they are to understand them. Horwitz released his findings

Her research points out that religious engagement plays a similar role to these social attributes. Approximately half of the American teenagers cite religious faith as being extremely meaningful to them and one in three of them praying at least once daily. To assess what role of religion may have on middle or high school grades, she analyzed data from surveys and interviews collected over a 10-year longitudinal research project by the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). The project was launched in 2002 by researchers from the University of North Carolina and University of Notre Dame at chapel hill to explore how religion influenced the lives of American

Using a classification system by sociologists Melinda Lundquist Denton and Lisa Pearce, she assigned each respondent to one of the five common types of religiosity. On one end were the abiders; who feel close to God, attend religious services, pray regularly and emphasize the role of faith in their lives while on the other end were the avoiders; they believe in the existence of God but avoid religious involvement and its relevance to other issues in their lives. She discovered that abiders had significantly better grades; an average GPA of 3.22 than the avoiders with 2.93. She says that the good results from the abiders were a reward for their respect, obedience, and self-control.

The link between grades and religiosity held even after accounting for race, gender class, religious denomination and certain behaviors linked with strict religious practice in teenagers like limited sexual activity and low alcohol consumption. Basically, kids that were closely supervised by their parents drank less and had less sex. These were some of the variables that explained why abiders did well in schools. While these variables helped explain some reasons why religious kids do better in school, there was still something above and beyond these factors in her models that the survey