{"id":99,"date":"2017-05-09T14:00:08","date_gmt":"2017-05-09T18:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-spring-2017-cdardins\/?page_id=99"},"modified":"2017-05-14T22:05:12","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T02:05:12","slug":"peer-reviewed-articles","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-spring-2017-cdardins\/peer-reviewed-articles\/","title":{"rendered":"Peer-Reviewed Articles"},"content":{"rendered":"

W. E. B. Dubois states “Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops man.” (1) These two peer-reviewed articles, “Food Deserts and their Relationship with Academic Achievement in School Children” by Seth Edward Frndak and “School Gardens in the City: Does Environmental Equity Help Close the Achievement Gap” by Rashaw Ray, Dana R. Fisher and Carley Fisher-Maltese address an aspect\u00a0of the environment\u00a0outside “school house\u00a0walls” in urban communities:\u00a0a lack\u00a0of physical spaces to practice\u00a0healthy eating and social spaces to increase social and cultural capital. (2) They claim that this aspect of urban communities\u00a0places the children living there at a disadvantage academically.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In his article, Frndak determines degree of\u00a0accessibility to these physical spaces where individuals can practice healthy eating by measure of\u00a0one’s distance to a supermarket. He labels those regions located at least one mile away from a supermarket as “urban food deserts.”<\/strong> (3) Beyond the decreased food access, food deserts typically lack in produce variety and food quality. Meanwhile, these regions maintain a high density of fast-food restaurants. Together, such conditions of food deserts in urban areas ultimately\u00a0diminish the fruit and vegetable intake by individuals residing there.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Figure 1: Urban\u00a0food desert<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Frndak dedicates\u00a0the remainder of his article to discuss the findings of his study of obesity rates and academic achievement in food desert areas. He studied\u00a0over twenty-two urban districts in New York, obtaining food desert data, student weight statistics, fourth grade achievement scores, demographic information, and school district quality data. While Frndak only corroborated previous findings showed insignificant\u00a0impact of food deserts on obesity rates (4), he made an unprecedented discovery when it came to the relationship between food deserts and academic achievement in schools.<\/p>\n

Initially, Frndak found the proportion of people living in a food desert area\u00a0to healthy food to be unrelated to the academic achievement scores of that school district. However, after incorporating the socioeconomic status, racial, ethnic and school quality indexes, Frndak was able to conclude the\u00a0proportion\u00a0of individuals at low access to be negatively correlated with achievement scores.<\/strong> In other words, because many impoverished individuals\u00a0lack those assets obtained by most wealth individuals (knowledge of the consequences of an unhealthy diet, ability to spend more on expensive\/higher quality food, and access\/spending power for transportation), they are unable to\u00a0combat the challenges presented by\u00a0a food desert, like academic achievement.\u00a0Frndak concludes his article by stressing\u00a0the importance of school programs that work to improve the nutritional intake of school children and therefore to raise\u00a0test scores as well (5).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ray, Fisher and Fisher-Maltese promote one way of increasing the fresh fruit and vegetable intake of students located in food deserts: the implementation of school gardens. T<\/strong>he authors take\u00a0their studies a step further than Frndak’s and investigate why the existence of gardens in schools and academic achieve is related to\u00a0the decline\u00a0of race and class inequities (6).\u00a0<\/strong>To do so, the authors utilized\u00a0fifth graders’ math, reading, and science standardized test scores in city of Washington DC. Ray, Fisher, and Fisher-Maltese began by first\u00a0confirming that school gardens are more likely to exist in those schools serving a higher percentage of White students and schools serving a lower percentage of students on free and reduced lunch. Secondly, the authors discovered the students in schools with gardens to be more likely to score higher in\u00a0math, reading, and science test scores in relation to students without access to a school garden (7).\u00a0<\/strong>While, ultimately, the authors were unable to confirm their hypothesis\u00a0that school gardens would recede the link between the race and class composition of students and their academic achievements, they were able to reach\u00a0several unique conclusions regarding the impact of school gardens on students.<\/p>\n

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Figure 2: Children putting beets from their school garden in Washington DC.<\/p><\/div>\n

The authors’ research\u00a0enhances\u00a0today’s understanding of how best to engage Black and low-income students to consider STEM as potential career paths (8). They also conclude that school gardens serve as plausible gateway for\u00a0racial\/ethnic and low-income students to participate in local environmental and civic activities. This participation may then lead students to join movements, such as the environmental justice movement, and address the inequities that challenge their own neighborhoods.\u00a0Ray, Fisher, and Fisher-Maltese end\u00a0their article\u00a0with these influences of school gardens that extend beyond improving nutritional intake and student achievement<\/strong>, a final attempt to\u00a0convince their readers of the efficiencies of garden schools, especially in the food deserts described in Frndak’s article.<\/p>\n

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W. E. B. Dubois states “Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops man.” (1) These two peer-reviewed articles, “Food Deserts and their Relationship with Academic Achievement in School Children” by Seth Edward Frndak and “School Gardens in the City: Does Environmental Equity Help […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":447,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-99","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-spring-2017-cdardins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-spring-2017-cdardins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-spring-2017-cdardins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-spring-2017-cdardins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/447"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-spring-2017-cdardins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-spring-2017-cdardins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-spring-2017-cdardins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}