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 sp+ke 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.
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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.
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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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