Anna Saavedra, Morgan Polikoff and Shira Korn—University of Southern California
This study examined International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years Programme (MYP) students’ academic progressions to high school and continuing into post-secondary education. Researchers used student-level panel data from a large public school district located in the Mid-Atlantic (United States) and employed multiple regression modelling and propensity score matching methodologies to examine the outcomes of MYP students, while accounting for their prior academic achievement and demographic characteristics. The results indicate that MYP students who subsequently enrolled in the IB Diploma Programme (DP) were more likely than matched MYP students who did not enroll in the DP to achieve higher high school GPAs, higher total PSAT scores, higher total SAT and ACT scores, and to record more service learning hours. Post-secondary data analyses show that MYP students who continue to the DP exhibited a nine-percentage point increase in the probability of immediate college enrollment, compared with the matched group of MYP students who did not continue to the DP.
