Academic Achievement and Nongradedness.
To date, studies comparing pupil achievement in graded and non-graded elementary schools have been inconclusive in their findings. It has been suggested that a large proportion of these investigations have been based on the assumption that the descriptions of schools as “graded” and “nongraded” have been valid. In the present study an Index of Non-gradedness was assigned to schools on the basis of teacher responses to Carbone’s questionnaire for evaluating a nongraded school program. Fourteen teachers of grades five and six answered the questionnaire. Of the four schools studied, School A scored a high Index of 2.81 while School B scored a low of 0.86. The reading and language sections of the California Achievement Tests (CAT) were then administered to twenty pairs of pupils in these two schools, who were matched for IQ. Applying the 2-tailed t-test, it was found that pupils in School A scored significantly higher (0.01 level) in each of the categories of the CAT, with the exception of spelling.