Academic Press, Sense of Community, and Student Achievement

Using the concepts of academic press and sense of community to represent the two contrasting normative social and academic dimensions, this chapter examines the separate and joint effects to influence student learning. It argues that strong academic press serves as a prerequisite for creating the type of communality in schools that is conducive to higher student achievement. Academic learning is certainly the shared responsibility of students and parents, as well as teachers. The impact of communality among low-Student socioeconomic status (SES) schools becomes positive, however, as levels of academic press increase. In fact, the strongest achievement effects among low-SES schools occur when both communality and academic press are at their highest levels. The chapter deals with the separate and interactive impact of school academic press and sense of community using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study.