Fahad B.
Iqbal
May 21,
2013
BBH 143
Blog post #2
This paper examines the effects of alcohol use on high school students’
quality of learning and cognitive behavior. The researchers estimated, using
data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The researcher’s
primary measure of academic achievement was the student’s GPA abstracted from
official school transcripts. The research showed that increases in alcohol
consumption result in small yet statistically significant reductions in GPA for
male students and in statistically non-significant changes for females. For
females, however, higher levels of drinking result in self-reported academic
difficulty.
Despite a growing literature in this area, no study has convincingly
answered the question of whether alcohol consumption inhibits high school
students’ learning. Alcohol consumption could be an important determinant of
how much a high school student learns without having a strong impact on his or
her decision to stay in school or attend college. Excessive alcohol
consumption contributes to an average of approximately 4,700 deaths among
underage youths in the United States each year (i.e. homicides, motor-vehicle
crashes and suicides) and an average of 60 years of life lost per death (Lotfipour et al., 2013). Although
drinking by underage persons is illegal in every state, youths aged 12-20 years
drink nearly 20% of all the alcohol consumed in the United States (Lotfipour et al., 2013).
In summary of this article, drinking and driving has steadily declined since the late 1900s, but alcohol-related fatalities and binge drinking among
teens still remains extremely high. One in every five teenage drivers is involved
in a fatal car accident and 81% of those teenage drivers have BAC’s over the
legal limit in their respective states. Though a number of investigations have
studied the associations between alcohol use and years of schooling, less is
known about the impact of adolescent drinking on the process and quality of learning
for those who remain in school. Thus bringing up the question…is it ‘safe’
for youths to consume alcohol without having any adverse effects on their grades
or cognitive development?
Lotfipour S., Cisneros V. and Chakravarthy B. (May, 2013). Vital
Signs: Fatalities and Binge
Drinking
Among high School Students: A Critical Issue to Emergency Departments and
Trauma Centers. 14(3): 271-274.
Pubmed. Retrieved from
No comments:
Post a Comment