The DoDDS Class of 1982

The Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS) serve dependents of overseas military and civilian personnel. Based on the data from High School and Beyond (HS&B), this Note characterizes those students of the DoDDS senior class of 1982 that stayed in the same high school from their sophomore to senior years. It describes their performance on cognitive tests, their high school experiences, activities outside school, and plans for college, by comparing them with 1982 seniors in stateside public, private, and parochial schools. Out of a sample of 1638 sophomores in 1980, only 423 seniors were still attending the same school in the spring of 1982. The study concludes that: (1) generalizations based on data from the small sample of remaining seniors are greatly limited in scope and may therefore be limited in utility; (2) sophomores who stayed in the same high school from 1980 to 1982 ("stayers") differed significantly from those who left ("leavers") in terms of their background, cognitive-test performance, high school program, and life values; (3) the pattern of relations between stayers' characteristics and cognitive-test performance, high school participation variables, employment, and plans for college is generally similar to the pattern for high school students at large; and (4) DoDDS officials might consider policies that increase the time spent on homework and decrease that spent watching television.