Student researchers at Dordt University are working to uncover the intricacies of how air quality can impact student performance across the U.S.
Daniel Garcia and Cameron Grimes, both incoming juniors at the Sioux Center private university, with support from faculty, have spent the summer combing public education and pollution data to explore how different pollutants can influence test scores. While they’re still analyzing results, the pair said they’ve already seen interesting results about pollution and where schools tend to be built.
Associate economics professor Joshua Hollinger said the “question of air pollution and test scores” came from conversations with assistant professor of engineering Jonathan Gingrich, as well as the idea to include undergraduate students in the research.
“It’s one of those things that I think you learn by doing a lot,” Hollinger said. “It helps when you have good students that are willing just to try to figure things out.”
Grimes, an economics major, analyzed a dataset from Stanford with test scores spanning the decade from 2009 to 2019 and other demographic data, as well as previous literature on this topic. Garcia, who’s studying for his bachelor’s degree in data science and computer science, focused on a database from the Center for Air, Climate and Energy Solutions to examine different pollutants.
An overarching goal of the project is to “quantify differences in pollution across districts across the country,” Hollinger said, and to “line that up with different disparities between groups.” Previous literature suggests that air pollution does have a negative impact on test scores and that groups like minority students and low-income students are more likely to go to school in areas with worse pollution.
“What we’re kind of trying to do with this is pull together all the data to describe this at a national level, and then try to eventually get at the question like how much of the differences in test scores that we see across more and less advantaged groups, how much of that might be potentially explained by different exposure to pollutants,” Hollinger said.
Using both fixed regression and two-way fixed effects models, Grimes said, the group found that across time, if a school district’s nitrogen dioxide levels increase then its test scores go down. However, the data seemed to show that school districts with higher nitrogen oxide levels in general test slightly higher, Hollinger said, which could be due to other variables.
One finding they didn’t expect to run into was just how many schools are located close to major roadways. Garcia said the team mapped out highways then plotted where schools sat in relation, and found that “a very high percentage of schools” sit within 250 meters of a highway — nearly 20%, Gingrich said in a news release.
A study from Florida correlates proximity to highways, as well as the wind’s direction, with test scores and sick days, Grimes said. That study found evidence of worse school attendance in schools located downwind of a highway.
While the work the Dordt researchers are completing won’t necessarily point to causal relationships between the factors they’ve focused on, Hollinger said the eventual goal is to “tie things more to some of the more causal research.” As for the students, their work right now is pointed at finishing their data analysis and getting a report completed and hopefully published.
“The overall goal is a journal published outside of Dordt,” Grimes said. “But we’re still trying to figure out again, like what are we truly understanding from the data, what does the data actually tell us, what does this differ from other research that’s done, and then where would this best fit for the wider public?”
Each of the researchers said they want to bring more awareness to this topic, and Hollinger said the bigger reason to study negative impacts from pollution is to “help us kind of weigh the costs and benefits of how we might mitigate that, especially when certain groups are much more negatively affected than others for historical reasons.” Examples he said included redlining and how cities were constructed with major roads going through certain areas.
“Personally, I had never heard that there was any sort of relationship between education and air pollution,” Garcia said. “So I guess … just adding that awareness to people, so that they’re conscious of where they go to school, or where they can build a school.”
As most students live near their schools as well, Hollinger said, an aspect of this issue they couldn’t show in the data but one that could provide more evidence to the need for fixing air quality more than just school location.
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