The main purpose of a dig is to encourage students to dig beneath the surface of the readings and other learning materials such as audiobooks. Towards this end digs are formatted like a discussion.
Over a 10 day period you’ll need to submit at least one comment and at least one question based on the learning materials for the upcoming session 5 on effort.
You'll need to make sure to read the previously posted discussion points to see if your question needs to be changed. You’ll also need to keep checking the discussion even if you have already posted a comment and a question: I expect everyone to be up-to-date on the discussion issues when you come to class.
Remember you'll be posting at least one question and one comment (or at least two posts for each person). You can post anytime between September 27 through midnight of October 8.
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36 comments:
Apparently you'll all be disappointed to know I didn't even log on to the website until Monday morning. In any event, here is my comment regarding the learning materials:
The discussion of hopelessness in the audio book made me think about the connection between ability and effort. It seems that students enter a state of hopelessness when they make an effort, don’t succeed and then begin to develop the belief that they simply lack ability. Stipek talks about this in her text I am reading for the book conversation. She mentions that at this point a teacher must not simply encourage effort because effort does not always increase ability. It is here that a teacher needs to begin to encourage and maybe model specific effort with strategy. So this is where we find a difference between effort and effort with purpose (or strategy).
Or, perhaps put a little differently, effort without strategy skills is "flailing." Lots of energy involved, but to no successful end.
Effort married with effective strategies, as you point out, becomes a whole different matter: an effective way to make progress.
I also have a comment about helplessness. It is interesting for me to learn that helpless students attribute failure to low ability as a result of repeated failure. I can’t help but think about special education students or students that need extra resources in the classroom. Most of the time these students experience repeated failure with regular instruction until they actually get tested and accommodated. These students begin to believe that they are not meeting expectations of teachers and/or parents and they become completely helpless. For example, I have a student that is in my classroom that was recently classified as being a special education student. His resource teacher asked me to make special accommodations for him so I allowed him to use his notebook on a chapter test. The notebook had all of the answers to the questions and he just had to search for them. However, he failed the test because instead of searching for the answers he told me he just wrote down whatever he saw in his notebook but didn’t really search for the correct answers because he wasn’t going to get it right anyway. I didn’t know what to make of his comment at first but now I feel as though he is a helpless student because of previous failure in school.
I thought that I posted a comment yesterday. Where did it go?
Here goes for comment number 2.
I liked the Ahmavaara and Houston article. I can't help but to think about the gender gaps that they mention that occur between males and females. However, they mention nothing to do with culture. I know that this was done in the UK, but our American challenges seem so similar but so different. Has the cultural aspect of this been explored?
There seems to be a connection between the van Laar article to self-efficacy in that "self-efficacy refers to students' beliefs about their capability to learn or to perform effectively" and "outcome expectations refer to students' beliefs about the ultimate end of performance" (Sungur & Tekkaya, 2006). This means that if someone has high self-efficacy, they then have high outcome expectations and vice versa.
If the students in van Laar's study had high expectancies in high school and then low expectancies in college, did their levels of self-efficacy decrease as well? If so, then of course their levels of motivation and attributions to succeed decrease. But how can self-efficacy decrease if one knows how to be self-efficacious?
Reference
Sungur, S., & Tekkaya, C. (2006). Effects of problem-based learning and traditional instruction
on self-regulated learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(5), 307-317.
Hi Kristina,
I was also curious as to how self-efficacy decreases in people that are self-efficacious. The article mentions that there are other factors that the students are concerned with that I believe hinder them from continuing to be self-efficacious. For example, they are concerned about confirming stereotypes of their ethnic group and their attributions become more external. I think that since the students are coping with a combination of factors, self-efficacy can easily decrease.
Here is the repost of my original post.
On a completely practical note, so many students do these things in my classroom. A typical "underachiver" thinks that something must be wrong (easy) if he or she is actually able to complete the task, even if it is rather challenging. Believing that he or she is "smart" is unheard of.
They have to "learn" this from somewhere. Where do they get this thinking pattern from? If younger children are more impressionable, they why are teachers and parents not made more aware of it? It just seems like aspiration is a "skill" like reading or doing math. You need to learn how to do it.
Kristina, following up on your comment about the Van Laar article I think you raise an interesting point, and one thing that kept nagging me was the fact that they were studying college-aged students…. I wonder how the history of the students impacts the results at the college level, noting that the authors acknowledge academic differences between the two races are not that great at young ages and increase dramatically with age. Of course someone could always critique a study for past influences, and so this is not so much a critique but a question. What would this study look like with elementary-aged or preschool students?
Just wanted to piggyback on the van Laar article.
I am too confused! There is a pretty convincing argument, which recommends that ethnicity and opportunity is appropriately addressed in educational institutions. However, the way I understand the article, the attribution accounts of the black students are largely guided by perceived and not real opportunities and expectancies. Therefore, what are the chances to break this paradox when students are receiving their cues as abstractions from a society at large rather than in forms of actual experiences?
In relation to the Van Laar article, I found much of the information very interesting. Like others have commented, it is peculiar how differences between races increase at such a dramatic rate with age. I can see and understand the argument that African-American students have high expectations at the onset of college, but this decreases once college begins and there is fierce competiton and discrimination is perceived. It is difficult to understand why there is such a lack of perception to the discrimination before college? I guess I'm also wondering what colleges these students are attending? Are they major universities, state colleges, or junior college? (Did I miss that somewhere in the article?) For a student to be going to college, how different is the racial make up compared to high school? This would never happen, but would race-based schools be beneficial like gender-based schools in certain circumstances? Just to throw some things out there!
I am not trying to answer my own question here, but I find the social identity theory (Armstrong et. al. 2008 p. 615) quite relevant to my stated problem. If one looks at the African American university students as a social group ,then ,social identity theory does support van Laar’s (2008) finding, that black student with time are more and more indentify with the perceived African American group stereotypes. At the same time the theory also predicts that differences in individuals levels of identification with particular groups are reliable predictors of the range of aspects of commitments to the group. Which means, that there is a possibility that one might be able to change the paradox described by van Laar by creating new institutional environments that would enhance the identity formation processes of African American students with their own academic groups instead of race based social groups. Any thoughts?
I really enjoyed reading the van Laar article since many of my students are African American. The article included information on a study done by Crocker et al. in which African American students' self-esteem decreased when they received a negative evaluation from an evaluator who could not see them but not when they received a negative evaluation from some who could see them. The study suggested that the student's self esteem was presumably protected when the student was visible to the evaluator because the student could attribute the negative evaluation to the evaluator's prejudice rather than to characteristics internal to the student. My question is, how would the students' self-esteem differ if the evaluator was also African American?
I thought the information about how teacher sympathy & anger can convey unintended messages to students was very important and has practical considerations for educators. Interestingly, the Direct Instruction model specifically designed and endorsed to support learners with special needs may serve to diminish student’s expectancy for future success. This is a very severe consequence especially for this particular population of students.
Within the context of my own classroom, whether working with regular education students or students with special needs, I have reflected on the times I have felt frustrated or angry versus sympathetic with a particular student. Interestingly, it was those times in which I demonstrated frustration or anger that I felt most guilty about my behavior. I had not previously considered the notion that anger can send the message of expected higher outcomes. I think our tendency to label anger as a negative character trait and sympathy as a positive character trait leads us to believe that positive traits intuitively would be most beneficial to learners. The Attributional Cue Sequence clearly demonstrates how this may not be the case.
Given this the question becomes: How do we teach young students to interpret our responses? I am not sure younger students interpret either response [anger or sympathy] as intended.
Navdeep,
Regarding your comment about the Crocker et al. article in which African American students' self-esteem decreased when they received a negative evaluation from an evaluator who could not see them, I too wondered how their self-esteem would differ if the evaluator was also African-American. But with further thought, I considered that this negative reaction [decreased self-esteem] is the result of the institutionalized racism within schools that students encounter year after year and not the result of an isolated event. If the evaluator was African American the student may not be able to attribute the negative evaluation to the evaluator's prejudice per se, but they could attribute it to the fact that the evaluator works within a system of institutionalized prejudice.
Considering that caucasian woman make up the largest percentage of educators, African American students go through their entire academic career receiving very little feedback from African American teachers and/or other African American support staff. If this were not the case and African American students received equitable amounts negative feedback from both caucasian and African American teachers and assuming that the feedback was consistent in content, then the ethnicity of the evaluator may be irrelevant and the student may be more likely to attribute the outcome to internal causes.
Does this make any sense? I am not sure I am actually articulating this very well...
Hi Kristina and Navdeep,
Based on what I am learning about self-efficacy from my book project with Terry, self-efficacy occurs on a "sliding scale" depending on many sociocultural factors. Developmentally, a person has more or less efficacy for particular activities or tasks depending on emotional maturity and the types of control one exerts over internal and external motivators to persist with that task or activity.
Bandura says, "It is the way in which people take advantage of opportunity structures and manage constraints under the prevailing sociocultural conditions that make the difference" (p. 163). So, I think that if the students in the Ahmavaara & Houston study who are studying for selected school exams perceive this as an opportunity, then they might have more engagement, persistence and confidence. And for boys, if they perceive they will be bread-winners, they may be even more motivated to achieve.
Bandura, A. (1997) Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, Freeman and Company, NY
I too liked the Ahmavaara and Houston article. What caught my attention was the comment toward the end of the discussion section on the limitation of this research on causality among variables. They pose that it's possible for students with fixed intelligence perspective to underachieve and place in a non-selective school.
What I wonder is whether the student's intelligence belief is influenced instead by where they see themselves in the future. If they see themselves in a professional career, they may correlate success with malleable intelligence. A practical example of this would be that doctors always have to keep learning in order to maintain their license. Or, a student who has a fixed intelligence perspective sees himself in a working class role and may not think he needs to try very hard at the examinations, thus getting enrolled in a non-selective school for trade work.
So does a student's future ambition influence his/her intelligence perspective?
Hi Amy,
With regard to your question as to what the van Laar study would look like with younger students, I would hope that self-efficacy would be on the rise. But we have to keep in mind that the students in van Laar's study lost self-efficacy with age and environment changes. So, I suppose another question is which environment best fosters self-efficacy at the age when self-efficacy is most fragile?
Hi Mary, yes that does makes sense. Thanks for your insight.
One comment I have about the van Laar article concerns the different reactions between Black and White students in response to academic challenges in college. Many students experience the shock of coming from a high school environment where they were at or near the top of their class. They go to college and all of a sudden they find themselves 'average' or below average. Some students can crank it up with effort and go through a the process where they learn to think and analyze as their brains become more fully developed. Others may drop out as they give up or percieve the challenges as too great to overcome. The van Laar article makes me wonder if a higher percentage of Black students who find themselves challenged by college attribute the difficulty they experience not only as external but also racially tinged whereas White students who have not been exposed to racism attribute the more academically challenging environment internally and look to their own ability. The resulting effort (and drop-out rate) of Black and White students in meeting the academic challenges may be very different if the reasons for difficulty academically is ascribed to very different causes.
Kimi-In response to your 'practical note,' I, too, get students who are surprised when they can get the answer quickly. They often think there must be a 'trick' to the question or that they don't understand what I might be looking for. Many students have doubts in their ability to understand, think, and come up with a 'correct' response and I usually see this in female students. This is consistent with the comments made in the Ahmavaara & Houston article about boys reporting higher levels of confidence in their own levels of intelligence than girls, but girls outperform boys in all areas.
Doing something in the classroom to change the perceptions of my female students about their ability would be wonderful...
A. Bandura, in his book, Self-efficacy: the exercise of control, shows little favor for attribution theory. Essentially, he considers the theory very over-simplified, or, disregarding too many relevant factors. He also argues that ability is controllable.
I would have to agree with Bandura that ability is anything but uncontrollable, as Peterson and Schreiber (2006) claim. With that in mind, their results in their Table 1 are not surprising at all.
Bandura's theory of performance is anything but simplified. He attempts to include all possible factors under all possible circumstances. I wonder if it is going to be analyzable at all. Is it possible that Attribution theory is a good simplification of Bandura's theory, much like the simplification one obtains by doing a hierarchal regression analysis of a broad data base of factors, though it was not likely arrived at that way?
In regards to Kristina's questions posed to Amy, in my extra book I'm reading for book talk, The will to learn by Covington, Covington talks a lot about parenting styles. If a parent is authoritarian, failures are commmonly punished and successes are given little praise. Authoritative parents praise successes and rarely acknowledge failure. This might have something to do with home environment that best fosters self-efficacy, but does not contain the question of age.
Steve,
I think you have a point regarding the different drop-out rates between Black and White students. The White students attribute failure to ability or effort which is controllable, so they can respond. Black students, on the other hand, attribute their failure to racial reasons which are not controllable, and there's nothing they can do.
I have been trying to relate van Laar's study of Black college students to my students, but it's not working. On one hand, the students enter with a severe low esteem, which I now see as not the case for Black students. On the other hand, many of my students enter college with a poor preparation, like the Black students, which probably comes as a surprise to them, but like Steve said, that happens to the best of us. Not all of my students fit into one minority group, so I think I need to look further.
Something interesting relating to motivation and praise happened in my classroom today that gave me pause. One of my black students answered a question correctly near the end of class and received praise from several white students. There was a moment where another student commented on the difficulty/ease of the question, and I could tell the students were debating how difficult the question was and how much the answer should be attributed to effort versus ability.
I like to think that I made the right call by stating that the student didn't have to make as much effort to answer that question because his efforts to pay attention and learn the material during class made it easier for him to respond later. Having read Terry's comment and reflecting on my own--I wonder just how much effort and strategy can be used to change ability, especially ability in specific topics that draw from "crystallized intelligence" (knowledge of a particular topic) versus "fluid intelligence" (ability to solve novel problems without prior substantial knowledge of the problem domain). This last comment further makes me want to connect ability to the different areas of human cognitive ability from Bob Burns' summer course on the topic.
Dionne,
The long term ambitions that students harbor, their aspirations as van Laar would say, certainly ought to be a motivator.
But, I read an article this past summer in a Math journal about 10 bad habits that students have. One was focusing only on short term goals. So I guess it is not the motivation factor it could be.
Hi Dionne,
In response to your question, does a student's future ambition influence his/her intelligence perspective? I think you may be on to something here. The first thing that comes to mind are students who excel in competitive sports. Students who excel in a sport may not have the same intelligence perspective as students who don't excel in this area. In secondary education, participation in sports can lead to a specific career ambition that is not tied to academic success but the success in that particular sport. This may lead a student to exhibit "less effort" in academics and "more effort" in fostering their sports ability based on their future ambition.
Hi Gina,
In response to your question, Would race-based schools be beneficial like gender-based schools in certain circumstances? It would be interesting to replicate the Van Laar(1998) study at a pre-dominantly African-American University such as Howard University to compare the effects of external attributions, expectancies and self-esteem among African-American students. Would the change in environment and classroom make-up change the external attributions of African-American students?
I enjoyed the Ahmavaara & Houston article. I found the discussion of entity vs incremental theories of intelligence helpful. In fact, as I was handing back their first accounting exam today I was using the theory to try to discourage students who did poorly on the exam that they don't just "suck" at accounting and it is more a matter of preparation and SRL.
I was slightly upset by the van Lear article. I have a hard time believing that as I was handing back a poor exam score to an african american student earlier this week that they attribute the poor score to discrimination by the evaluator (me). I understand the coping mechanism of external attribution but I question the definition of discrimination. If you include in discrimination the fact that perhaps some african american high schools do not prepare thier students for college as well as their white counterparts, then I get it and it makes sense. I also thought it was convenient that the author dismissed the contrary information published by Graham,1994 because it was in a lab. Is she saying that all attitudinal studies done in a lab are not generalizable? My impression is that perhaps the author had an agenda but I could be wrong. Was anybody else skeptical?
Like Mark, I thought the distinction of intelligence theory types, incremental vs. entity, in Ahmavaara & Houston's (2007) article, was interesting.
The authors were surprised that there turned out to be no significant correlation between gender and theory of intelligence, in contrast to research by Dweck and his colleagues. But then I noticed that that basis was established in the early 80's. But that's not necessarily a contradiction; maybe they are both correct. Could it be that society has evolved over the past 15 - 20 years, rendering gender less diagnostic?
I was surprised to read that research had shown there is a trend to entity theory within the adolescence period. What?! Are they taught that? That's an indictment of the system if I ever heard one. But I was relieved to see the results of the Ahmavaara & Houston that found the opposite effect to be true, though small. In this case too, perhaps we are learning, over the years, not to teach entity theory.
Steve
I agree many students come to the BIG university and find out they are no longer the big fish in the small pond but that they are now a small fish in a really big pond and they have to swim harder and faster to keep up. While the van Laar article points to the different reactions between Black and White students in response to academic challenges in college and touch's on the subject of racism it doesn't explore racist attitudes in depth.
To shift the subject to a nursing perspective. The was recent research that looked at the incidence of preterm births between African American and white women. The African American women had a higher incidence then the white women across all social economic levels. The research hypothesized that internalized racism couple with external racism increased the stress hormones in the woman's bodies and that lead to the preterm babies.
If racism and the resulting stress has such a profound affect on the health what affect does it have on students academic success?
Dionne
If a student's future ambition influences his/her intelligence perspective? Isn't the parent's and teachers who's role it is to encourage them to reach for their dreams.
If a child is placed in a 'lower level school' after doing poorly on a standardized test why is anyone surprised when they don't excel? Aren't they living up to the expectations of the system into which they were placed?
Being a champion of the underdog I can't help but wonder how many people don't live up to their full potential because of the system?
Hi there Mark,
As a student who could have possibly participated in the Van Laar study, I'm equally as skeptical about the some of the inferences made in this article.
However, this research study is a snapshot that is specific to the students at UCLA in 1998 where the number of African-American student participants was N=134. In the longitudinal study the number of African-American student participants was N=51. It would be hard to generalize their findings to students outside of the UCLA population.
While reading the van Laar article, I was struck by a comment made at the end of the first paragraph on page 41 about students who take ethnic studies classes. The statement said that attending classes or workshops on racial or cultural awareness increases the likelihood of perceiving discrimination--but this sounds too similar to my ears as "causes the increase." There is of course the possibility that students who are inclined to perceive discrimination are more likely to take ethnic studies classes--but that possibility is not mentioned.
In spite of this complaint, I really like the article and it makes me think more about the differences in experience and perception my Black students have. Not just between them and me, but I have African students from Ethiopia, Ghana, and Sudan (Darfur) as well as African-American students--and they have notably different perceptions and levels of motivation in high school. Granted, I teach at a selective but diverse high school in SF--so I'm somewhere in the mix between the two articles we read, but still more food for thought.
Hi Mark,
I don’t think what van Laar sad is that laboratory settings are not generalizable, rather that such setting excludes the relevant social system and its structural limits. I think she has a valid argument rejecting the findings of such a study done in a “vacuum.”
Re-reading the section we are discussing now, I wonder if in a lab structural inequalities were really removed or perhaps both the white and black students equally attributed their perceived successes’, failures and efforts to a new external entity “The Lab.”
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