Adolescence: Change and Continuity

Questions from Teachers . . . Answers from Students

As you know, we are students from Nancy Darling's Transition to Adulthood class. We read your email and did some research that will hopefully help you to understand the impact of poverty on cognitive development. We will start by giving some facts about poverty and academic achievement, then some strategies used in past research. Hopefully this will help answer your question.

While looking for research to assist in answering your question, we came across some statistics. The United States Department of Education provided some interesting statisitcs relating to school poverty and academic achievement. The main focus of this research was to expose the gap in achievement between students in advantaged school and those students who attend school in a high-poverty area. According to the research, "While the gap in math and reading achievement for 9-year-old students in high and low-poverty schools is significant...The gap in average math scores between 9-year-olds in high and low-poverty schools was 22 points in 1996 (Department of Education,1998)." The research went on to state that the gap in reading scores was dramatically larger than the gap in math scores in high-poverty schools. The National Assessment of Educational Progress tested for levels of achievement in the areas of math and reading. The results from the testing found that, "...a decrease in the percentage of 4th grade students in high-poverty schools scoring at or above the basic level in reading-- from 33 percent in 1992 to 26 percent in 1994 (Department of Education,1996)."

Facts:

Family income, parental occupation, and parental education (in that order) have the most baring on academic achievement. School success lessens with the duration of poverty. The chances that a child is placed in special education increases by 2-3% for every year the child lives in poverty (McLoyd, 1998). Long term poverty predicted problems in verbal, math, and reading skills 2-3 times greater than current poverty status.

In addition to the duration of poverty, the type of neighborhood the child lives in effects academic success. Children who grow up in affluent neighborhoods or neighborhoods with a high percentage of affluent families complete more years of school than children growing up in poor neighborhoods. Parental support, teacher attitudes, and aspects of the school also effect a child's school success. Academic achievement is associated with verbal interactions between mother and child, high expectations of parents, and discipline (McLoyd, 1998). It was found that low emotional support and lack of cognitive stimulation in the home can account for up to 1/2 of verbal, reading, and math skill deficits in children. During the summer months, children living in poverty do not have cognitive stimulation which causes them to regress in academic abilities.

Research on teachers has found that many expect less from children from a poor background, and so the children do not perform as well.

Interventions:

Authoritative parenting (strict, but warm) is correlated with academic success. This type of parenting helps children overcome obstacles holding their achievement back outside of the family.

Early intervention, such as preschool programs prepare children for school and have excellent success rates. Afterschool care programs are also a good intervention because they provide cognitive stimulation. Programs such as these have higher success rates when the child has been involved in them for a good amount of time (2 years) and with great intensity.

Intervention Strategies

Intervention programs vary depending on the location of the instruction, one needs to figure out if the intervention should be oriented towards children, parents, or the children within the context of the family. Programs may be center or home-based, or a combination of both. This all has to depend on funding (Hupp, 1999).

Sensorimotor Curriculum:

Instruction selection of goals are taken from the Piaget's Sensorimotor domains, (object permanence, means-ends relations, imitation, operational causality, spatial relations, object schemes), (Hupp, 1999).

Mastery Motivation:

Mastery behaviors are goal directed and often result in success. These behaviors are considered important because they relate to increased competence assessed both concurrently and in later years providing for an opportunity to practice manipulating environmental relationships (Hupp, 1999).

Information Processing Strategies:

The idea to remember in this strategy is that rehearsal aids memory. So instruction that promotes more accurate recall, association, or categorization is valuable to the degree that the instruction promotes independent living.

1. Several strategies involve ordering the input of information; Ex: clustering words into categories encourages recall.

2. Modification of task procedures.

3. Assisting people to incorporate verbal rehearsal and to create visual images also increases recall.

4. Spacing of implementation of instruction by at least a day (Hupp, 1999).

Social Mediation:

The effectiveness of a teaching process developed by Feuerstein, termed mediated learning experiences, states that teachers should:

1. Elicit evidence of the child's problem-solving strategies when engaged in a task

2. Questioning the child about the processes that she or he used 3. Accepting as much of the child's answer as possible

4. Challenging answers of the child (correct and incorrect)

5. Teaching the child to induce generalities from the particular task; and 6. Highlighting the child's own problem-solving strategies (Hupp, 1999).

In conclusion, in terms of poverty effects, the focus needs to be on the parenting skills of low-income families and caregivers. In order to help the children, the whole family must be helped. There are numerous intervention programs and community based organizations available to poverty stricken families. Yes, educators do have a difficult responsibility of teaching and instructing young poor children, but the ultimate influence needs to be the family. Our group hopes that our information will come in useful to you. We thank you for the opportunity to work on an assignment that may help you and your school.

References:

Hupp, S.C. (1999). Promoting cognitive competence in children at risk.

American Behavioral Scientist, 34, 454-464.

McLoyd, Vonnie C. Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Child Development.

American Psychologist 1998. Vol. 53(2) 185-204.

School Poverty and Academic Achievement in High-poverty Schools - A Special

Evaluation Report for the National Assessment of Title I. Department of

Education of the United states of America. September,1996.

http://www.ed.gov/pubs/school poverty/.

Robin Bruni

Molly Corbett

Kenny Lawson

Erica Rohrbach

Talin T.

Last updated 4/16/01.