2001 — 2003 |
Yoshikawa, Hirokazu (co-PI) [⬀] Hughes, Diane (co-PI) [⬀] Way, Niobe (co-PI) [⬀] Tamis-Lemonda, Catherine [⬀] Aronson, Joshua |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
The Children's Research Initiative: Integrative Approaches - Cri: Center For Research On Culture, Development and Education
Abstract
New York University: Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education
Joshua Aronson, Diane Hughes, Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, Niobe Way & Hiro Yoshikawa
Despite thousands of research studies, hundreds of remedial programs, and decades of being considered a crisis for American society, the chronic academic underachievement of numerous ethnic minority groups continues to perplex educators, social scientists, and policy makers. Three trends add weight to the crisis. First, within the next 50 years, people identified currently as "minority" will comprise half of the U.S. population. Second, particularly in large urban centers like New York, new waves of immigrants are arriving, ensuring fundamental, but unknown changes to the structure and dynamics of schools and other contexts. Third, the U.S. continues to evolve into a "knowledge-driven" economy, making a solid education vital for an increasingly large sector of the workforce. More than ever, a sizable proportion of our nation's children are at risk of academic failure and economic hardship. Faculty from multiple scientific disciplines at New York University will use NSF funding to support planning activities over a 6- to 9-month period pertaining to research that will be pursued under the proposed Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education. The central aim of the Center will be to examine how homes, schools, peers, work, and the media jointly contribute to the engagement, learning, and school performance of children from diverse cultures. Three steps are needed to accomplish this mission. First, we propose to describe the experiences of minority children within each of the educationally relevant contexts. Many social scientists focus on determining the predictors of children's academic outcomes without a deep understanding of children's everyday experiences. Such descriptive work is notably absent in research focused on ethnic minorities. We need systematic knowledge regarding how contexts such as home, peers, school, parents' work, and the media differ or are experienced differently by children from different cultures, ethnicities or social classes. Second, we seek to understand how these experiences shape children's engagement, learning and performance in school, and whether and how such connections may vary by culture, ethnicity, and social class. Third, our ultimate goal is to advance an understanding of how home, peer, school, work, and the media work together in explaining children's academic achievement. The second mission of the Center is educational: to transmit its research findings, through training and dissemination, to three communities: (1) a new generation of scholars of diverse backgrounds who are engaged in research on culture and its role in child learning, engagement, and performance; (2) the broader research community; and (3) policy makers and practitioners in education. This will occur through an intensive and rigorous training program and a variety of dissemination strategies of both research findings and lessons for policy and educational practice. The proposed Center is situated within a School of Education, in the vibrant, incomparably diverse context of New York City, making it an unparalleled locale for studying culture and schools, and an ideal place to establish a think tank capable of attracting additional scholars and students of the highest quality. Through the work of the Center, we aim to bring about a deeper understanding of the interplay of culture, development and education, and thereby enhance the nation's response to the academic underachievement of ethnic minority children.
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0.915 |
2002 — 2008 |
Yoshikawa, Hirokazu (co-PI) [⬀] Hughes, Diane (co-PI) [⬀] Way, Niobe (co-PI) [⬀] Tamis-Lemonda, Catherine [⬀] Aronson, Joshua |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Center For Research On Culture, Development and Education
The academic underachievement of certain ethnic minority groups in America continues to perplex educators, scientists, and policy makers, despite thousands of studies, hundreds of remedial programs, and decades of being considered a crisis. Several recent trends add weight to the crisis. First, within the next 50 years, people identified as ethnic "minority" will comprise half the U.S. population. Second, new waves of immigrants continue to arrive, ensuring fundamental but unknown changes in the intercultural dynamics of schools and other contexts. Third, the United States has evolved into a "knowledge-driven" economy, making a solid education, particularly in math and science, vital for an increasingly large sector of the workforce. Finally, recent federal legislation calls for annual standardized assessments of school children, a prospect that may disadvantage certain minorities who typically underperform on these tests. More than ever, a sizable proportion of our nation's children are at risk of academic failure, posing a serious threat to the current Administration's goal of "leaving no child behind." In line with this national goal, the Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education (CRCDE), housed at New York University (NYU) will conduct research designed to identify pathways to academic success for all children. Prior research has focused narrowly on a single context (e.g., the family, peer relationships, school quality, etc.) in predicting academic outcomes, or has investigated the roles of ethnicity, race, immigrant status, gender, or socioeconomic status separately. Neither approach, however, has adequately addressed the ways in which multiple contexts contribute to educational success and/or disparities, nor how pathways vary by developmental period and culture. Furthermore, an over-emphasis on group differences has resulted in the neglect of patterns of academic outcomes within ethnic, socioeconomic, or cultural groups. Finally, studies across all of these areas have tended to utilize single methodologies, rarely integrating survey, ethnographic, experimental, and observational methods. To address these gaps, the CRCDE will gather and disseminate data about the pathways that lead to successful academic engagement and performance among culturally diverse children and adolescents. The scientific mission of the CRCDE is to use an integrative conceptual framework, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and multiple methods to (1) identify the nature of relationships that link children's experiences in five educationally relevant contexts, home, school, peers, caregivers' work, and media, to their academic engagement and performance; (2) examine whether and how these processes vary within and across cultural groups and across developmental periods; and (3) advance an understanding of how home, peers, school, caregivers' work, and media affect one another and jointly influence children's and adolescents' academic engagement and performance. The educational mission of the CRCDE is to (1) train a new generation of scholars, especially those from underrepresented minority groups, to engage in research that advances the scientific mission; (2) produce instruments and methods that will strengthen the scientific capacity of the research community to conduct culturally sensitive research on academic engagement and performance; and (3) transmit findings to policy makers, practitioners in education, and researchers, through dissemination of findings and lessons for educational policy and practice. The Center's location in the diverse context of New York City (NYC) is ideal for a center devoted to research at the confluence of culture, development, and education.
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0.915 |
2006 — 2009 |
Aronson, Joshua |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Understanding and Overcoming Social Psychological Barriers to Academic Development in African American Students
African American students at all levels of achievement continue to lag significantly behind their White counterparts, even when they have comparable abilities to Whites. Among the reasons cited for this gap is the consistent finding that African American students are considerably more susceptible than Whites to low expectations on the part of teachers and important others. Not only are they subject to lower expectations, but they also appear to be more sensitive to those low expectations. The proposed research is concerned with the learning difficulties faced by college students who are exposed to racial and cultural stereotypes alleging academic or intellectual deficiencies. This proposal delineates a set of experiments that can help solve the mystery about why Black students tend to be more susceptible to "the soft bigotry of low expectations" than their white counterparts. No research exists that offers more than speculation about the antecedents of this greater "expectancy sensitivity," or begins to explain why some students may be more influenced than others by external expectancies, be they high or low. The proposed research tests a model that holds that expectancy sensitivity is fostered by stereotypes alleging the intellectual inferiority of Blacks. In a longitudinal design, Study 1 tests the following questions: Do students with high versus low SV report different goals and behaviors? Does SV predict self-concept clarity, measured self-handicapping, expectancy sensitivity and academic progress over time? Participants will include minority students in the Robert Wood Johnson summer program of The American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC). In a laboratory experiment involving 120 African Americans participants from AAMC, Study 2 will address the following: Does SV lead students to avoid diagnostic feedback? The goal of Study 3, another laboratory experiment involving AAMC students, is to understand whether people who chronically expect to be judged as academically inferior (i.e., those hi in SV), are unsure about their own academic strengths and weaknesses. Specifically, this study seeks to answer: Does SV lead to an unclear academic self-concept? In Study 4, African Americans students will participate in a longitudinal intervention study aimed at increasing the accuracy of their self-knowledge. Study 4 answers the following question: Can academic self-concept clarity, learning and performance be fostered by interventions promoting a malleable vs. a fixed view of ability? Ultimately, this research can shed light on a number of important issues relevant to the achievement gap such as why some African Americans achieve more than others with the same abilities and why African Americans are more prone than Whites to live up or down to teachers' expectations. What's more, the outcomes of this research may prove to be particularly useful in suggesting ways that teachers, parents, or practitioners can intervene to foster achievement and mastery in academic settings.
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0.915 |