ADOLESCENT FAMILY-STRUCTURE AND EDUCATIONAL-PROGRESS

The secondary analysis of a subsample of high school sophomores from a national data set compared students from intact, single-parent, and remarried families with respect to academic achievement, high school grades, and educational persistence. Differences among the three groups with regard to achievement test scores and high school grades were slight, though statistically significant. Larger differences among groups were found in relation to drop-out behavior. Students from intact families were least likely to drop out. Students from single-parent and remarried families showed approximately equal frequencies of drop-out behavior but strikingly different gender differences. Drop-out behavior was found to interact with the gender of the student in combination with the gender of the custodial parent so that children living with like-gender custodial parents were less likely to drop out in single-parent families, but more likely to drop out in stepfamilies.