Learning from Poor Minority Students....
- From: "SUNRISE" <txivneejhmoob@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 13 Dec 2005 16:34:30 -0800
Learning from Poor and Minority Students Who Succeed in School
Children's views on success and failure have a big impact on their
learning
By Janine Bempechat
When Raymond was four years old, his family moved to the United States
from Mexico. As in many immigrant families, everyone worked hard to get
ahead in their new country. The children helped their mother deliver
newspapers before she started her day cleaning houses. Their father
worked on an assembly line during the day, at a gas station later in
the afternoon, and at a pizza factory at night. And the parents still
found time to encourage their children to achieve in school. "They
helped the four of us get through college and graduate school," Raymond
recalls, "not with monetary support, but by demonstrating persistence."
This is one family's story of success against the odds. Raymond and his
siblings successfully navigated the journey from working- to
middle-class status. The unfortunate reality is that, on average, poor
and minority students underachieve relative to their middle-class
Caucasian peers on a variety of indices, such as GPA, SAT scores, high
school completion, and college completion. What is it about Raymond,
his siblings, and his parents that has enabled them to prevail where so
many others falter?
Relative to the voluminous literature on the causes of school failure,
there is little research on how some students succeed against the odds.
Most studies have focused on understanding differences between groups,
usually comparing middle-class Caucasian students with poor or
working-class minority students. Leaving aside the appropriateness of
such comparisons, one important result is that we know little about
differences between high and low achievers within the same group.
Recent advances in achievement motivation theory have provided a
conceptual framework for exploring the ways in which high and low
achievers may differ in their approaches to learning. In particular,
the focus on children's beliefs about the causes of success and failure
has helped us understand why some students embrace academic challenge
while others shy away from it.
Bernard Weiner's influential work at UCLA has guided much of the
research in achievement motivation over the past two decades. Studying
how students explain their own academic success and failure, Weiner has
shown that their explanations tend to focus on three broad categories.
The first is innate ability or intelligence; many students believe that
those who are smart do better in school. The second is effort; many
students cite trying hard as a necessary component of achievement.
Third, students mention external factors, such as having been lucky
enough to study the right material or being the teacher's pet. As one
might expect, students tend to attribute failure to lack of ability,
insufficient effort, and external factors such as bad luck. Weiner has
demonstrated that, in general, those who attribute success to ability
and effort tend to fare better in school than those who implicate luck
or other external factors.
Students who work
cooperatively in the classroom
tend to be less worried about how
smart they are relative
to others and to focus on
learning for its own sake.
Just how children view ability can have important consequences for
their levels of motivation. In separate studies, John Nicholls, author
of The Competitive Ethos and Democratic Education, and Carol Dweck of
Teachers College at Columbia University have concluded that children
who view ability or intelligence as a quality that is unfixed and
changeable are much more likely to tackle risky, challenging tasks and
to rebound from failures by redoubling their efforts. Those who see
their ability as fixed tend to choose easy assignments over challenging
ones and to be less resilient about failures. (See "When Bright Kids
Get Bad Grades,"Harvard Education Letter, November/December 1992.)
Furthermore, Nicholls has shown that children's beliefs about
intellectual ability can shift when they are young, but tend to gel
when they reach 5th or 6th grade.
How, then, do high and low achievers within a given racial or ethnic
group differ in their attributions of success and failure? Are there
any commonalities among high achievers in all groups? And, given the
importance of family involvement in schooling, do high and low
achievers report any differences in their parents' attempts to foster
academic achievement?
These questions drove a recent study of achievement and motivation in
students from groups ordinarily considered to be at risk for school
failure -because of poverty or minority status, because their first
language is not English, or because they live in single-parent homes or
have mothers who did not finish high school. From 1991 to 1995, my
colleagues and I surveyed more than 1,000 5th- and 6th-graders in ten
public and Catholic schools. The students were African American,
Latino, Indochinese, and Caucasian, all drawn from poor neighborhoods
in the Boston area.
The students completed two questionnaires. The first asked about their
perceptions of the reasons for success and failure in mathematics. The
second asked how often their parents provided academic help and spoke
about the value of schooling and its relation to their futures. To
assess achievement, we also administered a 10-minute computational math
test. With this information, we examined what beliefs, if any, and what
kinds of parental involvement, if any, were associated with higher
achievement in mathematics. Additionally, we were able to investigate
whether any such relationships were the same or different for the
various ethnic groups.
Although there were differences in average math scores across the
groups, the higher achievers in all ethnic groups had similar beliefs
about the causes of success and failure. They believed that success was
due to high ability and, perhaps more important, they did not believe
that failure was due to lack of ability. In contrast, regardless of
ethnicity, the lower achievers believed that success was due to
external factors and that failure was due to lack of ability.
For example, when students were asked why a teacher might choose them
to count the money for a class trip, higher achievers in all groups
were more likely to answer that it would be because they were "good in
math." Lower achievers were more likely to give answers like, "It was
my turn."
In addition, the study showed that when compared with their public
school peers, African-American and Latino students in Catholic schools
had beliefs about success and failure that were more conducive to
learning. They were more likely to attribute success to ability and
less likely to attribute either success or failure to external factors,
such as luck or a difficult test.
The higher achievers in
all ethnic groups had similar
beliefs about the causes of
success and failure.
Our findings also spoke clearly against the popular stereotype of poor
parents as being uninvolved in their children's schooling. While there
were ethnic differences in actual mathematics achievement (with
Indochinese students the highest and African-American students the
lowest achievers), in all ethnic groups parental involvement was
perceived as higher when math achievement was lower. In other words,
all children perceived their parents as concerned about their
education-providing academic support by helping with homework, or
providing motivational support by emphasizing the importance of
education for future economic survival. There is evidence in
educational research for the notion that parents tend to increase their
involvement when their children are doing poorly. Simply put, it is the
lower achievers who need the help.
In light of this study and other research on motivation, what can
parents and schools do to promote both academic achievement and
positive attitudes about learning? While there is no one path to
academic excellence, these findings do point to some lessons for
parents and teachers.
Self-Perception of Ability
It is healthy for children to believe they have some measure of innate
ability. There is little question that parents' beliefs are critical
for their children's academic self-esteem. Researchers such as Susan
Holloway at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that
parents' beliefs about their children's mathematics ability have a
profound influence on the children's evaluations of their own ability,
their beliefs about the causes of success and failure in math, and
their attitudes toward math. And several studies of successful adults
from minority groups indicate that motivational support from
parents-statements that stress the value of effort or of education-may
be even more important for poor or minority children than whether the
parents can help with homework.
In a 1987 study of Asian-American summer school students at Harvard
University carried out by Herbert Ginsburg, now a professor at Teachers
College, students recalled that their parents supervised their study
habits, limited their extracurricular activities, and refrained from
assigning them household duties so as to free up time for study.
Parents frequently discussed the relationship between effort,
schooling, and success in life, and they supported academic activities
by providing resources such as calculators and workbooks.
Interestingly, many parents did not provide specific help with
homework.
Indeed, Weiner and his colleagues have found that children may
interpret unsolicited help from an adult as an indication of low
ability. Weiner has also shown that children as young as five can infer
a teacher's beliefs about the causes of their success or failure from
the teacher's emotional reaction to their performance. A teacher who
reacts angrily to failure, for example, is communicating that the
student is able to do much better.
Restructure Classrooms for Learning
The ways in which teachers structure their classrooms have a critical
impact on children's beliefs about the causes of success and failure.
Nicholls has shown that students in traditional, competitively
organized classrooms become overly concerned with how they are doing
relative to their friends. This in turn makes them very anxious about
mistakes and failure. They tend to become focused on whether, rather
than how, they can accomplish a task. Learning becomes an exercise in
attaining a desired product-the right answer. Under these
circumstances, children come to see mistakes and failures as
condemnations of their ability.
In contrast, students who work cooperatively in the classroom tend to
be less worried about how smart they are relative to others and to
focus on learning for its own sake. In cooperatively based classrooms,
children are more likely to focus on how they can accomplish a task.
They tend to view mistakes as necessary components of learning, and
learning as a process that involves sustained effort. Under these
circumstances, many children come to see mistakes and failure as
opportunities to learn, no matter what they believe about their own
abilities. Depending on the type of classroom structure teachers
choose, they are communicating a view of success and failure to their
students that can have a critical impact on children's beliefs.
Learn from Catholic Schools Our findings suggest that ethnic minority
students are at a distinct advantage when they are enrolled in Catholic
schools. Relative to their public school peers, Latino students in
Catholic schools believed more strongly that success is due to ability.
Both Latino and African-American students in Catholic schools were much
less likely than their public school peers to attribute failure to
external factors such as a difficult test.
The challenge for teachers is to
help their students maintain a
healthy balance between believing
that they have the ability necessary
to learn, and knowing that effort
will help them maximize their ability.
Did the Catholic school experience foster these adaptive beliefs, or
did the students arrive at Catholic schools with these beliefs already
in place? It is impossible to know for sure, but the growing literature
on the benefits of parochial education, especially for the poorest
children, suggests that aspects of pedagogy may contribute to the
development of positive attitudes about academic ability. These aspects
include high expectations and standards for both academic and social
performance, and the belief that all children can excel in school
provided that they invest effort.
This study has given us a clear glimpse into the ways in which high and
low achievers think about the causes of their successes and failures in
school. The most important implication for teachers in their day-to-day
work is that all lower achievers, regardless of ethnicity, are at risk
for believing that their poor performance results from lack of ability.
This belief is potentially very debilitating, for if students do not
think they have at least some ability, it makes little sense to them to
invest effort in their learning. The challenge for teachers is to help
their students maintain a healthy balance between believing that they
have the ability necessary to learn, and knowing that effort will help
them maximize their ability.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Janine Bempechat is assistant professor of education at Harvard
Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Against the Odds.
For further information
J. Bempechat, S. Graham, and N. Jimenez. "The Socialization of
Achievement in Poor and Minority Students: A Comparative Study."
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 30, no. 2 (March 1999): 139-158.
C. Dweck and J. Bempechat. "Children's Theories of Intelligence:
Consequences of Learning." In S. Paris, G. Olsen, and H. Stevensen,
eds., Learning and Motivation in the Classroom. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum,
1983: 239-256.
J. Nicholls. "What Is Ability and Why Are We Mindful of It? A
Developmental Perspective." In R. Sternberg & J. Kolligian, eds.,
Competence Considered. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990:
11-40.
.
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