Three grants totaling more than $5.5 million have been awarded to The University of Texas at Austin Department of Sociology and the Population Research Center to study the effects of recent curricular changes in the nation’s schools.

The three grants are funded by The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Science Foundation, the National Center for Education Statistics and the Spencer Foundation.

The Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement (AHAA) study will focus on the effect of school and curricular changes in the 1990s on students’ cognitive and psychosocial development, attitudes, behaviors and achievements.

The project focuses on the following areas: educational stratification and health, curricular exposure and the science/math pipeline, human capital and health, and education and the development of human relationships. The study will offer data on risk behaviors, violence and safety within school, peer and neighborhood contexts, as well as extensive data on dropouts. The study promises unique samples of special populations linked to academic stratification and school context, and will look at the lifestyle and health status of adolescents and their academic experiences in transition to adulthood.

By expanding on previous studies of adolescents, the AHAA study will give researchers longitudinal data on high school students in the 1990s to help analyze the success of new school policies and curriculum.

The project is headed by University of Texas at Austin Associate Professor of Sociology Chandra Muller and includes other University of Texas at Austin faculty, as well as faculty from Michigan State University and the State University of New York at Albany.