In a follow-up to a 2006 study, a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher and his colleagues found that an in-class writing assignment designed to reinforce students' sense of identity and personal integrity increased the grade-point averages of African-American middle school students over a two-year period, and reduced the rate at which these students were held back or placed in remediation.
The results suggest that targeted psychological interventions on a wider scale could help narrow the racial achievement gap among U.S. students, one of the most pressing and persistent domestic issues in our country, according to Associate Professor Geoffrey Cohen of CU-Boulder's psychology department and his fellow principal investigators Julio Garcia and Valerie Purdie-Vaughns of Columbia University.
The follow-up study appears in the April 16 issue of the journal Science. Nancy Apfel and Patricia Brzustoski of Yale University were co-authors on the study.
"In our original study we uncovered evidence that this self-affirming intervention improved the performance of African-Americans in a single academic term," Cohen said. "Now we have evidence that its effects persist over the two years of children's tenure in middle school."
The study also suggests that "intervening" early in students' middle school years can have long-lasting benefits by undermining a recurring cycle of increasingly poor performance in school.
Over the two years of the 2006-08 study, the grade-point average of African-Americans was, on average, raised by .24 grade points. Low-achieving African Americans benefited most from the intervention, with their GPAs increasing by an average of .41 points on a four-point scale. The assignment had no impact on white students' grades.
"Our intervention is based on the idea that ethnic minority students experience, on average, higher levels of stress in the classroom because they are concerned that if they perform poorly on a test or in a class this will confirm, in the eyes of others, the negative stereotype about their group's intelligence ability," Cohen said.
Past research has found that school settings in general are stressful to many students regardless of race. However, many African-American students may experience chronic stress in school stemming from negative stereotypes portraying them as less intelligent than their peers, according to Cohen. This in turn leads to decreased academic performance.
The study involved three experiments in which seventh graders from middle-class and lower middle-class families were given a series of structured writing assignments throughout the year. They were asked to choose one or two values that were important to them and then write about why they cherished the values. A control group was asked to write about values that others might hold or other neutral topics. A total of 416 students participated, divided in roughly equal numbers by race.
"This exercise, called a self-affirmation, allows a student to reaffirm that he or she is a good and competent person," Cohen said. "This helps reduce stress by allowing the student to think about all the things that matter to them, for example their family or their religion. It makes the possibility of failure less dire."
The study also suggests that how students perform during the school year is strongly correlated to how they perform during the first few weeks of that year. If a student starts off the year feeling more stress due to negative stereotypes, and then performs poorly during the first few weeks of school, this can establish a downward cycle of increasing stress and poor performance that is hard to break, said Cohen.
"Our study shows that early intervention seems to interrupt this downward trend in academic performance," he said.
Cohen and his co-authors also measured the students' sense of success at the beginning of the school year and again at the end. They found that for low-performing African-American students there is a drop in their sense of adequacy in school over the course of the school year, but for students who participated in the exercise, and for white students, their sense of success remained constant over time.
"This suggests that early failure can have a disproportionate effect on the negatively stereotyped group," Cohen said. "The first few weeks of middle school can have a negative effect on a child's self-concept that seems surprisingly persistent. We found that if you can buffer people against this you can potentially have long-term benefits."
Cohen said he plans to continue studying similar psychological interventions on other groups of students to see if similar positive results can be generated and to zero in on the mechanisms underlying these effects.
"In a society where economic success depends heavily on scholastic achievement, even a slight narrowing of the achievement gap would be consequential," Cohen said. "This is especially true for low-achieving students, given the societal, institutional and personal costs of academic failure."
Test Scores Vs. Classroom Grades
Although more than three million high school seniors take standardized college admissions tests like the SAT “it is well known by educational researchers that high-school grades are the best indicator of student readiness for college, and standardized admissions tests are useful primarily as a supplement to the high-school record,” according to Richard C. Atkinson.
“We now have a much deeper appreciation of why assessment of achievement and curriculum mastery remains vital as a paradigm for admissions testing. Curriculum-based achievement tests are the fairest and most effective assessments for college admissions and have important incentive or “signaling “ effects for our K-12 schools as well: They help reinforce a rigorous academic curriculum and create better alignment of teaching, learning and assessment all along the pathway from high school to college,” according to Atkinson.
The College Board’s SAT admissions test sends a confusing message to students, teachers, and schools. It featured esoteric items, like verbal analogies and quantitative comparisons, rarely encountered in the classroom. Especially troubling, the perception of the SAT as a test of basic intellectual ability had an adverse effect on many students from low-performing schools, tending to diminish academic aspiration and self-esteem. Low scores on the SAT were too often interpreted as meaning that a student lacked the ability to attend UC, notwithstanding his or her record of accomplishment in high school.
These concerns prompted Atkinson to propose in 2001 dropping the SAT in favor of curriculum-based achievement tests in UC admissions. UC accounts for a substantial share of the national market for admissions tests, and the College Board responded with a revised SAT in 2005. The “New SAT” (now also known as the “SAT-R,” for “reasoning”) “is clearly an improvement over the previous version of the test. A writing exam has been incorporated into the test, and verbal analogies have been dropped. Instead of deconstructing esoteric analogies, students must now perform a task they will actually face in college -- writing an essay under a deadline. The new mathematics section is more demanding, but fairer; while the old SAT featured item-types that were known for their trickery but required only a basic knowledge of algebra, the new math section is more straightforward and covers some higher-level math. “Reports from many sources indicate that the changes have galvanized a renewed focus on writing and math in the nation’s schools,” said Atkinson.
Though an improvement over the old test, the New SAT still remains at odds with educational priorities along the pathway from high school to college. The New SAT’s lack of alignment with high-school curricula has become especially conspicuous now that most states, like California, have moved towards standards-based assessments at the K-12 level.
Of all nationally administered tests used in college admissions, the College Board’s subject tests and AP exams are the best examples of achievement tests currently available. The College Board subject tests are offered in about 20 subject areas and the AP exams in over 30. AP exam scores were second only to high-school grades in predicting student performance at UC.
In conclusion Atkinson says, “Without question, the College Board SAT subject tests and AP exams have the strongest curricular foundations of any college-entrance tests now available, and more colleges and universities should find them attractive.”
Study Finds Link Between Facebook Use, Lower Grades in College
College students who use Facebook spend less time studying and have lower grade point averages than students who have not signed up for the social networking website, according to a pilot study at one university.
However, more than three-quarters of Facebook users claimed that their use of the social networking site didn’t interfere with their studies.
“We can’t say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying – but we did find a relationship there,” said Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in education at Ohio State University.
“There’s a disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing they had lower grades and spent less time studying.”
While this was a relatively small, exploratory study, it is one of the first to find a relationship between college students’ use of Facebook and their academic achievement.
Typically, Facebook users in the study had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while non-users had GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0.
In addition, users said they averaged one to five hours a week studying, while non-users studied 11 to 15 hours per week.
Karpinski conducted the study with Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University. They presented their research April 16 in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association.
The researchers surveyed 219 students at Ohio State, including 102 undergraduate students and 117 graduate students. Of the participants, 148 said they had a Facebook account.
The study found that 85 percent of undergraduates were Facebook users, while only 52 percent of graduate students had accounts.
Students who spent more time working at paid jobs were less likely to use Facebook, while students who were more involved in extracurricular activities at school were more likely to use Facebook.
Science, technology, engineering, math (STEM) and business majors were more likely to use Facebook than were students majoring in the humanities and social sciences.
“Other research had indicated that STEM majors spend more time on the Internet than do other students, so that may be one reason why they are more likely to use Facebook,” Karpinski said.
There were no differences in Facebook use between different members of racial and ethnic groups that were part of the study, or between men and women.
Younger and full-time students were more likely to be Facebook users.
Findings showed that 79 percent of Facebook users claimed it did not have an impact on their academic performance. In open-ended questions on the survey, users claimed they didn’t use Facebook frequently enough to notice an impact, and emphasized that academics were a priority for them.
Karpinski emphasized that the results don’t necessarily mean that Facebook use leads to lower grades.
“There may be other factors involved, such as personality traits, that link Facebook use and lower grades,” she said.
“It may be that if it wasn’t for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online.”
Karpinski said it was significant that the link between lower grades and Facebook use was found even in graduate students. She said that graduate students generally have GPAs above 3.5, so the fact that even they had lower grades when they used Facebook -- and spent less time studying – was an amazing finding.
The popularity of Facebook is evident in college lecture halls, Karpinski said. Faculty members who allow students to use laptops in class have told her they often see students on the Facebook site during class.
“It’s not going away anytime soon, and we need to learn more about how Facebook use is affecting students,” she said.
As for herself, Karpinski said she doesn’t have a Facebook account, although her co-author does.
“For me, I think Facebook is a huge distraction,” she said.
INCREASING THE ODDS OF COLLEGE GRADUATION FOR STRUGGLING STUDENTS
A researcher at Ohio State University has developed a course on learning and motivation strategies that actually increases the odds that struggling first-year students will graduate.
Students in academic difficulty who took the “Learning and Motivation Strategies” course in their first quarter at Ohio State were about 45 percent more likely to graduate within six years than similar students who didn’t take the class.
Average-ability students who took the course were also six times more likely to stay in college for a second year and had higher grade point averages than those who didn’t take the class.
“We are taking the students who are least likely to succeed in college and teaching them the skills they need to stay in school and graduate,” said Bruce Tuckman, a professor of education at Ohio State, and creator of the course.
“Just taking this one class has made a big difference in how well below-average students do at Ohio State.”
Tuckman and Gary Kennedy, a graduate student in education, recently completed a study looking at how students have fared after taking the class. They presented their results April 16 in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
The researchers compared 351 students who took the class their first quarter at Ohio State with 351 matched controls who didn’t take the class. The students were matched on quarter of enrollment, gender, age, ethnicity, high school class rank and ACT scores to make sure those who took the class were compared to students of similar ability and background.
Students were followed for seven years to determine if they stayed in school, and if so, what grades they earned and whether they graduated.
Along with the higher retention and graduation rates, students who took the class averaged significantly higher grade point averages for each of the first four quarters. Over those four quarters, course takers had an average GPA of 2.85, compared to 2.74 for their matched controls who didn't take the class, a difference of about three percent
While any student can enroll in the course, Tuckman said it is aimed at those at the bottom of the academic ladder – those with the lowest test scores and those with the lowest class ranks in high school.
Results of the study showed that these were the students who benefitted the most from the class.
“Students who did not do well their first quarter at Ohio State, which was the quarter they took the class, were the ones who had a higher likelihood of graduating compared to similar students who didn’t take the class,” Kennedy said. “They were able to turn themselves around."
While many colleges and universities provide students some assistance in learning study skills, few offer credit courses as does Ohio State. Offering a credit course gives more time to teach the skills and attracts students who might otherwise not participate, according to Tuckman.
The course now enrolls more than 1,000 students each year.
Tuckman said the below-average students in the class often don’t have the advantages of higher-ranked students when they arrive at college.
“If you lived in a strong education environment your whole life, had parents who were college graduates, you probably have the skills to learn and do well in college,” Tuckman said.
“But students who grew up in different environments, where no one has gone to college, need to be taught how to succeed in college.”
Tuckman said he designed the class around accepted principles about how people learn and how they are motivated. He identified four strategies which he teaches in the class: Take reasonable risk; take responsibility for outcomes; search the environment for information; and use feedback.
But the unique part of the class is how it is taught, Tuckman said. Students have to complete 216 short, online assignments during the 10-week quarter. Every one of these assignments is graded, and students receive constant feedback.
“We want to change students behavior, and to do that we have to get them to behave in ways that will help them succeed. They have 216 opportunities to behave in the ways we want them to, and they always know where they stand.”
The course is very structured, he said, which helps the students learn how they should approach all their classes.
“We create a cocoon in this course, and they live in that cocoon for 10 weeks,” Tuckman said.
“When those 10 weeks are over, they can create the cocoon for themselves, because they know what it is. They must be doing it, because they are coming back to school and graduating at higher rates.”
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