Factors Supporting School Engagement and Achievement among Adolescents.

Abstract

This study examined academic success, intrinsic motivation, and student perceptions as indicators of engagement in a multi-ethnic sample of secondary school students. A particular interest was in examining differences in student perceptions across middle and high school, and another focus was examining students' perceptions of the school's concern for students of various ethnic groups. Data were collected in a southern California community with one comprehensive high school and one comprehensive middle school. Of the 318 participants, 54% defined themselves as Anglo, and 54% were girls. Sixty percent were high school students, and the rest were in middle school. Adolescents completed a 53-item questionnaire that tapped perceived educational aspirations, perceived career aspirations, perceived support from teachers, perceived equal treatment of ethnic groups, self-appraisals of academic efficacy, and self-perceptions of intrinsic motivation. Archival data were collected on attendance, disciplinary actions, and grade point average. As predicted, more positive attitudes toward self and school were significantly related to several indicators of engagement. However, several attitudinal predictors of school engagement functioned differently as a function of adolescents' grade level, gender, or ethnic identification. This paper presents only the first round of analysis, but findings to date indicate that schools must sustain a climate that promotes a positive attitude in students of all ethnicities and thus encourages student engagement in learning. (Contains 3 figures, 2 tables, and 21 references.) (SLD) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. Factors supporting school engagement 1 Factors supporting school engagement and achievement among adolescents Cynthia Hudley, University of Southern California Annette Daoud, Rachel Hershberg, Rosina Wright-Castro, Ted Polanco University of California Santa Barbara Paper presented at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA. April 4, 2002 This research was supported in part by a grant from the Givertz Research Center for Excellence in Education, Santa Barbara, California. We express our genuine gratitude to the students, parents, teachers, staff, and administrators at the schools in which this research was conducted. Address correspondence concerning this article to Cynthia HudleyMC0031, Rossier School of Education, WPH 1001D, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-0031. Email: hudley@usc.edu U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) tVrhis document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. 13 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. ° Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessanly represent official OERI position or policy. 1 PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIALHAS BEEN GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONALRESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) 2 BEST COPY MAILABLE Factors supporting school engagement 2 Factors supporting school engagement and achievement among adolescents All children must feel motivated to engage in and persist with schooling if they are to take full advantage of whatever educational opportunities are available to them. Even if high quality academic preparation is available, high levels of achievement will implicitly demand high levels of academic motivation and engagement on the part of students. Young children typically display an insatiable curiosity and motivation to learn more about literally everything, as parents and teachers of young children will readily attest. However, students' motivation for school tasks declines steadily from mid-elementary school through entry into high school, irrespective of the quality of the academic offerings (Anderman, & Maehr, 1994; Lepper, Sethi, Dialdin, & Drake, 1997). Factors that might mitigate this normative decline have not been extensively examined. Therefore, in this study, we sought to understand a set of factors that might influence achievement motivation and school engagement among students in middle and high schools. Motivation is differentiated into various types; this study investigated intrinsic motivation at different ages. We define intrinsic motivation as the innate tendency to learn for the sake of personal satisfaction in increasing one's own capacities. Academic intrinsic motivation is best understood as the product of an optimal match between the individual, the task, and the learning environment (Ryan & Deci, 2000b). Any intrinsically motivated student, similar to the young child, will engage in learning for its own sake rather than an external prod (e.g., a fast food coupon), and will perceive the learning task to