High school journalism

I completed a professional journal article review earlier this week. I focused my research on the impact high school journalism courses may or may not have on students involved in such courses. As part of my research, I reviewed two professional journal articles touching on this subject, and wanted to share what I found.

 

The first journal article I read was researched by Jack Dvorak and Choi Changhe. They “found statistically higher scores for students who had high school newspaper or yearbook experience compared with non-journalism students.” College freshmen with high school journalism experience also scored high grades in freshmen college English courses than non-journalism students. Students with journalism experience also scored higher on the ACT, averaging a composite score 21.58 compared to 21.4 for non-journalism students.

 

The second journal article was researched by Lee Becker, Jeong Y. Han, Donna Wilcox, and Tudor Vlad. The results of their research were nearly identical to that of Dvorak and Changhe. Becker et al. found that students involved in high school journalism are more likely to perform better as college freshmen than their non-journalism peers. According to Becker et al., “Exposure to journalism at the high school level appears to have a lasting effect on students. The findings from this analysis add to, and update, the existing research on the impact of participation in high school journalism extracurricular activities.”

 

As I mentioned in my professional journal response, these statistics are important because, in short, the print newspaper industry is in a death spiral. Print newspapers, as we all know and (used to) love them, are going away for good. However, as I argued in the my paper, high school administrators and journalism advisors simply need to adapt their ways of teaching journalism so that the focus becomes less on print newspapers (if this hasn’t been done already). The statistics over the last 30 years are pretty clear – high school journalism equals better grades in college. I suspect those statistics will still hold true 30 more years from now, when print newspapers are a thing of the past. It’s the basic journalism skills, though, that make the difference – not so much the medium.