Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Christian Schooling in Terms of Academic Contingent Self-Worth

The primary goal of this dissertation is to theoretically propose an indicator that captures the effectiveness of Christian, both conservative Christian and Catholic, schooling on students' religious socialization in the academic domain and to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of Christian schooling using the indicator. In spite of the fact that Christian schooling has been ultimately intended for students' academic development and religious socialization simultaneously and the two aims are so closely connected, there has been little systematic effort to evaluate the effectiveness of Christian schooling by focusing on religious significances of academic development. As an effort to fill in the gap in the literature, this study suggests a normative expectation that if Christian schooling is effective, then Christian school students would form weaker academic contingent self-worth than public school students; then, in order to test whether the normative expectation is empirically supported, an ordinary least squares regression with dummy interaction terms and a two-way analysis of variance combined with the inverse probability of treatment weighting were respectively conducted using the datasets of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. As a result, it was found that there is no empirical evidence to confirm the normative expectation for Christian schooling, which is, in turn, led to the provisional conclusion that at least during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Christian schooling may not have been effective in leading students to internalize religious significances of academic development. Based on the conclusion, several implications are suggested including the need to revisit the practices of Christian school teachers and administrators. Finally, suggestions for future research are discussed.