Student Success Skills’ effects on Hispanic students

By Susan Davis, Johns Hopkins University

Student Success Skills (SSS) is a program designed to help students reflect and develop purposeful academic, social, and self-management skills that ultimately lead to improved performance in school. A guidance counselor delivers weekly classroom lessons in academic goal-setting and in non-academic areas such as tracking health, wellness, and anxiety, which when addressed, have been shown in research to positively affect academic achievement.

Because the Hispanic student population is the fastest-growing of all student subsets, to ensure adequate cultural responsiveness, researchers examined the impact of SSS on attendance, self-regulation, and test anxiety on the subset of 681 Hispanic fifth grade students within a 2019 randomized controlled trial of SSS (383E, 298 C) from 30 schools in a single district. Following a one-day training, school counselors in the experimental group were randomly assigned to deliver SSS weekly for 45 minutes over five weeks, with a monthly booster session January-March. Control counselors continued with regular counseling practices. . All students were tested two weeks before the experimental group began receiving treatment, two weeks after the fifth lesson and thirty weeks after the fifth lesson. Students were evaluated using three years’ attendance data and two student surveys: the Student Engagement in School Success Skills (SESSS) Self-Regulation of Arousal subscale and the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) test anxiety subscale.

Results showed that at 30 weeks post intervention, students who had been in the SSS group had better attendance and less test anxiety than controls. These improvements were not evident in at the first post-test, but were evident at the second, implying that time is needed both for students to create better habits and for schools to nurture the environments needed to encourage attendance and promote a safe environment. These findings mirror the findings of the overall RCT from which this data was drawn. Self-regulation showed no statistically significant difference between the two groups at either pre- or post-test—while experimental students’ self-regulation scores were indeed higher than controls’, the difference was not statistically significant.

Set your goal, set your mind!

By Winnie Tam, Centre for University and School Partnership, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Researchers have suggested that some self-learning strategies could outperform IQ in predicting achievement.  Lee and colleagues conducted three experiments to explore the effects of three types of achievement goals on students’ self-control, plausibly the main subset of self-regulation. With experimentally-manipulated goals assigned to students through different instructions given about set tasks, two aspects were investigated: attention control and inhibitory control after negative feedback. Results were based on accuracy and reaction time on a continuous performance test for experiment 1 and a Stroop test for experiments 2 and 3. Secondary school students (mean age = 13.5 – 14.0) and college students (mean age = 23) in Korea were randomly assigned to one of three goal achievement conditions: mastery approach goal (MAP); performance-approach goal (PAP); performance-avoidance goal (PAV)

Mastery-oriented students strive to develop their own competence. Students with a performance-approach goal and a performance-avoidance goal pursue achievement to demonstrate their competence. The former strives to outperform others and confirm their superiority, while the latter avoids performing worse than others and hides their inferiority. All three experiments and tests were performed through computer interface. After controlling for initial scores, the results of three experiments are summarized as follows.

•            Experiment 1, in which a fourth group with a goal-free approach was included, was focused on attention control.  The MAP group performed significantly better than the students in PAP (ES = +0.52) and the no-goal control group (ES = +0.55). No significant differences were found between PAV and MAP, and between PAV and PAP.

•            In experiment 2, interruption by fake negative feedback, tailor-made for different goal conditions, was utilized to tap student’s inhibitory control.  Students in MAP outperformed students in PAP (ES = +0.14) but were not significantly different from students in PAV (ES = +0.13). There was no difference between PAP and PAV in terms of accuracy.

•            Experiment 3 was identical to experiment 2 except those participants were college students. The experiment aimed to generalize the findings to early adolescents. The MAP group scored significantly better than the PAP (ES = +0.73), but there was no significant difference in hit rate compared to the PAV group (ES = +0.20).  There was no difference between PAP and PAV.

One of the major contributions of this study, according to its authors, was adopting direct and objective measures of self-regulation instead of subjective self-report rating. All three experiments unanimously supported the benefit of adopting mastery goals for better self-control in completing cognitive tasks.

How do achievement goals relate to students’ academic burnout, learning engagement, and test anxiety?

By Ken To, Centre for University and School Partnership, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Students can have multiple achievement goals, which influence their development in several aspects. In an article recently published in Learning and Individual Differences, Hongrui Liu examined achievement goal profiles held by Chinese students and how these profiles were associated with learning-related outcomes.

1,518 students from 70 classes in five schools in Beijing completed a questionnaire that measured their achievement goals, academic burnout, learning engagement, and test anxiety. The achievement goals being measured included mastery goals, performance approach goals, and performance avoidance goals. The authors later classified these goals into five achievement goal profiles, labeling them as “high all,” “moderate all,” “low all,” “mastery-oriented,” and “approach-oriented” for comparison. The results showed that:

• The mastery-oriented profile was more adaptive than having multiple high goals, because it exhibited lower academic burnout, learning engagement, and test anxiety. The mastery-oriented profile was similar to having multiple high goals in terms of self-efficacy and learning engagement, but it was associated with lower emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and test anxiety.
• The approach-oriented profile demonstrated more adaptive learning patterns than having multiple goals of any intensity; it was similar to the mastery-oriented profile in terms of cognitive engagement and test anxiety, but it demonstrated lower emotional exhaustion and cynicism and higher self-efficacy and behavioral and emotional engagement.
• Having multiple goals of a high intensity showed higher efficacy and learning engagement than having multiple goals of low and moderate intensity, but were less adaptive in emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and test anxiety.

The authors suggested that the profile of multiple high goals was a common type for Chinese adolescents. Recognizing that it is less adaptive, improving Chinese students’ endorsement of the mastery-oriented and approach profiles instead of multiple high goals may lead to more positive and persistent learning outcomes.