- The academic achievement of students in 4th and 8th grade in both reading comprehension and mathematics applications was significantly different at schools with different school composition. Students in low poverty schools scored significantly higher than students in the medium poverty schools, who scored significantly higher than the students in high poverty schools.
- Although the academic achievement of students in 4th and 8th grades in both reading comprehension and mathematics applications was significantly different at the three levels of poverty, the factor of poverty as operationalized by free or reduced price lunch status accounted for very little of the variance in SAT scores.
- Although there were significant differences in the academic achievement among students at the three poverty levels, other unidentified sources of variance that were not included in the design may have been responsible for the differences.
- Significantly higher achievement for students in the low poverty schools at both the 4th and 8th grades on both the mathematics applications and reading comprehension subsets of the Stanford Achievement tests. Students in the low poverty schools had a mean scale score that was significantly higher than that of students in the medium poverty schools.
- Results indicated that differences in the percentage of poverty level students in a school significantly affected scores in reading comprehension and mathematics applications at both 4th and 8th grades.