The Idea of an Essay, Volume 2

80 single-sex school and students who enroll in a coeducational school (695). Secondly, school-driven bias differentiates between students whose applications are accepted by administrators and students whose applications are rejected (695). These selection effects, in turn, greatly contribute to the quality of the students attending each school, whether they show high performance or low performance, which would in turn affect the test score outcomes. This study also takes peer quality into consideration. As noted before with selection effects, peer quality would largely depend on the type of school. In general, private schools have more finances at their disposal and higher academic standards than public schools. As such, comparing coeducational public schools to single-sex private schools is inaccurate, because the quality of the students will be different in each school. Based on the results of their study, which does take selection and peer quality factors into account, Hayes, Pahlke, and Bigler concluded that “it is overall peer quality, rather than the gender composition of the schools, that explains single-sex school students’ outperformance of coeducational school students” (702). Meagan Patterson and Erin Pahlke conducted a similar study that goes even further by examining the effects of factors such as race, prior academic achievement, and peer preferences. The data gathered during their study indicates that race definitely influences academic success. For instance, Patterson and Pahlke concluded from their study that African American and Latino students were more prone to lower grades than their peers of different ethnicities (746). Previous research has indicated that the academics of minority groups within a school are affected by the percentage of students of that minority in the school (746). Next, Patterson and Pahlke hypothesized that whatever academic achievement a student showed before attending a single-sex school would be an indicator of the student’s achievement in the future (740). In accordance with their hypothesis, their results indicated that prior academic achievement does indeed predict future academic achievement (747). The study also examines the factor of peer preference. Peer preference differs from peer quality, mentioned in the previous study, in that peer quality concerns the overall performance level of the students, while peer preference concerns the students’ inclination towards male or female friends. Patterson and Pahlke hypothesized that peer preference would be a predictor of academic performance