Intervention improves student academic outcomes

Updated 10:00 AM Sept. 25, 2006

Intervention improves student academic outcomes

By Jared Wadley
News Service

An innovative program to help middle school students articulate their visions for the future and link these visions to current efforts helped them reach their academic goals, a U-M study shows.

Two years after a school-based program started, students who participated earned better grades, skipped school less often, participated more in class, spent more time doing homework and had fewer symptoms of depression, says U-M expert Daphna Oyserman, the study's lead author.

"Students say they want to succeed, and teachers are invested in teaching, yet there is clearly a gap between students' attainments and their hopes for the future," says Oyserman, professor of social work and psychology and researcher at the Institute for Social Research.

According to Oyserman's theory of identity-based motivation, youths will be more likely to engage in persistent efforts in school if they can envision doing well as a goal and if strategies to do well come to mind. But succeeding in school is not just an academic goal, she says.

"Caring about school and using effective strategies for doing well in school have to feel like in-group things to do," she said. "Boys have to believe other boys want to do well in school and are willing to study in order to succeed; girls have to believe the same about other girls."

Oyserman says the same is true for African Americans, Latinos and other minorities; each group must believe that caring about success in school is a genuine part of being a member of the group.

Trained group leaders worked with students on a series of activities, including:

• Picking from among an array of photographs to capture adult images.

• Drawing timelines into the future to gain a sense of the sequencing of time, choices, and obstacles to overcome.

• Working in groups on everyday problems like getting bad grades on tests.

The program first was tested in Detroit as an after-school program in a middle school. When shown to be successful, it was implemented in three Detroit middle schools. A random half of students were assigned to attend the 11-session program; the other half attended class as usual. The program was completed prior to the end of the first marking period to allow students to improve their efforts before receiving first-quarter grades.

Data were collected from the eighth grade (264 students), including grades and attendance and teacher-report of students' in-class participation and initiative-taking, as well as disruptive behavior. Youths were followed through the eighth grade and the transition to high school until the end of ninth grade.

The effects of intervention emerged by the end of eighth grade and became more marked over time. Youths who participated in the intervention had a better attendance record, grade point average and standardized test scores.

By the end of ninth grade, intervention youths spent an average of 2.51 hours a week on homework—nearly an hour more per week than the control group, which averaged 1.57 hours per week. The intervention youths were less likely to disrupt class and more likely to take initiative in class.

The researchers showed that these successful academic outcomes were the result of increased salience of doing well in school and of avoiding getting off-track with pregnancy, drug use or involvement in crime in students' images of what they might be like in the future.

The collaborating scientists are Deborah Bybee, statistical methodologist of Michigan State University, and Kathy Terry, a former postdoctoral fellow at U-M's Institute for Social Research. The study results appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Intervention improves student academic outcomes

More Stories