Parental Smoking Associated with Teens’ Below-Par Test Scores
Well I haven’t had much luck with finding articles on my other topic, technology in education, so I decided to scan through the feeds for standardized testing once again and came across another interesting topic; Parental Smoking Associated with Teens’ Below-Par Test Scores. According to this article, “Teenage exposure at home to second-hand tobacco smoke seems to go hand in hand with poor performance on standardized academic tests, investigators here [Philadelphia] found.” Statistics show:
If either parent smoked, a child had 25% to 30% higher failure rate compared with children of nonsmokers, Bradley Collins, Ph.D., of Temple University, and colleagues, reported in the October issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health. The higher failure rate held up for either ordinary or advanced-level examinations.
This never occurred to me that second-hand smoke could affect someone’s test taking abilities. I knew that smoking and second-hand smoke can cause lung cancer and other problems, but had no idea it could affect the academic outcome of a student. The article also stated that their study shows that “tobacco smoke is an environmental toxin that affects academic performance.”
The investigators analyzed data from 6,380 women and their offspring in the 1958 National Child Development Study. Pass-fail performance was assessed by means of British standardized achievement tests (ordinary-level and advanced-level). The results showed that prenatal exposure to environmental tobacco smoke did not affect test performance, whether assessed by ordinary-level or advanced-level exams. However, parental smoking significantly increased the likelihood of test failure on either test, as did the family’s socioeconomic status. Maternal smoking increased the likelihood of ordinary-level test failure by 29% and paternal smoking by 30%. Male sex and smoking by the teenager also increased the likelihood of test failure. In the advanced-level tests, maternal smoking increased the risk of test failure by 24% and paternal smoking increased the risk by 27%. The only other significant predictors of failure were female sex and smoking by the teenager. These data highlight the importance of helping parents create smoke-free homes for their children-outcomes that can be achieved without requiring the immediate parental smoking cessation. Indeed, parental smoking cessation is the ideal outcome in reducing the children’s environmental tobacco smoke exposure.
“Evidence herein should further encourage multipronged efforts to reduce adolescents’ environmental tobacco smoke exposure.” So how do we do that? How can we stop people from smoking? It’s nearly impossible for people to avoid smoke. Many restaurants now are 100% no smoking, as well as other commercial buildings. But what about the students who live with smokers? We can’t make a law to prohibit everyone from smoking just to help students do better on tests. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for not smoking, especially if smoking does affect test scores, but I don’t believe there is no logical way to get everyone to quit doing it. The article added, “An environmental tobacco smoke reduction intervention would be a positive alternative to quitting smoking for those parents not willing or ready to consider abstinence-only treatment.”
Resource: medpagetoday.com
By Charles Bankhead, Staff Writer, MedPage Today
Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
September 24, 2007
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