Ability groups may demoralize weak students

You seldom come across a secondary school teacher who has not felt the pinch of increasing failure to take charge of the conduct of his or her students on account of strong peer influence. I have previously supported the need to teach young people to think for themselves as one way to address negative influence. But sometimes seemingly well-adjusted and capable students are misled by peers (commonly referred to as mates) into activities that do not contribute to their school success. I argue that this tendency is often rooted in such practices in school like ability grouping and the negative appraisal teachers often give weak students.

Self esteem and ability groups

Self-esteem is a self-maintenance motive. It is can be seen as a social product (consequence of social influence) or as a social force (a cause of social behaviour). School performance may be a cause of self-esteem. This is because academic success is a public and visible indicator of a pupil’s standing and society generally upholds academic success.

There are causal connections between low self-esteem, juvenile delinquency and poor academic performance. Prior poor performance in school brings some school authorities to draw categories of top performers, mediocre and poor performers. Ability grouping is a practice in some schools to place students in a given year in different streams according to their previous academic performance. You may have streams A, B and C with C being the class with the poorest grades. The aim of keeping these groups separate may be to give each group (especially C) the attention they need to improve. Unfortunately the C group may come to be looked on by some teachers as the students in whom there’s very little hope for improvement. I recall that my primary school had four streams with pupils achieving aggregate 4 and 5 learning together. With time even friendships I had with second grade students weakened because there were no longer close. In the A stream pupils who fooled around where sometimes threatened with instant deportation to stream D. In stream D the methods teachers used where different and sometimes 

To understand how teacher feedback is important in building or eroding esteem, let’s take a look at one principle of self-esteem formation—that is, reflected appraisal.  The principle of reflected appraisal holds that people’s feelings about themselves are strongly influenced by their judgments of what others think of them. Here self esteem is a product of social interaction. This principle has implications for ability grouping. 

The success of failure

Young people are very keen and can tell when a teacher does not care enough when they need help. Students with low self esteem often face undesirable conditions in school experiences that create feelings of doubt about their self-worth.  A peer group who live for entertainment may be the place where a youngster finds favourable reflected appraisals. This group replaces the negative feedback from teachers with positive reflected appraisals they receive from one another. In addition, defiance of authority in school may be played out before an appreciative audience of mates yielding positive reflected appraisal. A student may come to compare more favourably with peers in keeping up with the music charts than he or she does in classroom study. This student considers that they gather more positive self-attributions by observing success in keeping up-to-date with music than school work. A student’s failure to keep up with others in class becomes an avenue for acquiring positive appraisal from peers in activities in which they have genuine interest!

The stream of poor performers or those students who have little interest in school sometimes resist alteration of the image they have developed of themselves. As a result students are motivated to maintain the level of positive or negative judgments of their ability. The A class know they are good and often work hard to maintain their good grades. The trailing group is also constantly aware of their weakness and may not work any harder.

Optimism

Unless there is a deliberate effort by teachers to show that they have faith in weak students’ potential to work harder and excel, to constantly encourage and reward their every effort, weak students soon find alternative activities outside school that are rewarding and in which they obtain positive appraisal from peers. They may immerse themselves in sports, music or hanging around with little regard to any other responsibilities.

Teaching is a profession founded on optimism. It is here that people invest much time in others’ lives and future without any guarantee that beneficiaries will use their learning profitably. It is especially in the lives of students in various kinds of need (counsel, love or remedial tuition) that the most enduring and useful contribution of a teacher may be. 

(This article was first published with a few changes in the Daily Monitor newspaper)

What are we doing with computers in schools?

The last two decades have been a period of proliferation of information and communication technology in almost every aspect of life—from the mobile phone to banking and the remote tracking of motor vehicles. This technology revolution mostly driven by computer applications has also affected the education sector. There is ever growing concern about equipping classrooms with computers and to wire each of these computers to the internet. Private school TV adverts these days necessarily include a view of computers, perhaps as a up-to-date institution qualifier.

Technology-enhanced classrooms are inspired by constructionist theories that propose that learning is an active process wherein learners are actively constructing mental models and theories of the world around them. Social justice-inspired programmes like ‘One laptop per child’ also continue to roll out supplies of computers to developing world schools in view of what has been referred to as ‘bridging the digital divide’. 

The drive to provide computers is based on the thinking that if these machines are made available, they will be used; and if they are used, they will contribute to improvement of learning. Will computers deliver on the expectations of policy-makers and educational philanthropists? My argument is that the most needed energy for reviving and improving schools and higher institutions of learning should be sought in student agency manifested in reliable work habits and critical thinking skills.

Why bring computers to classrooms?

The social rationale is that digital technologies have become part and parcel of everyday life, and that schools should prepare students to be active participants in a digital age.  Similarly, the thinking behind a vocational, or market-oriented, rationale is that children should learn how to work with computers and later be able to compete for jobs at front ends of interview queues. Proponents of this position promote ‘computer literacy’ courses, concentrating on computer programming and the use of popular application programmes.  

The pedagogical rationale emphasizes a contribution to improving teaching and learning, sometimes through the use of new computer-assisted learning software in the classroom, or by using the computer as a tool that can expand and enrich knowledge acquisition and construction.

Another impulse for bringing computers to the classroom is from academics and educators in favour of self-directed learning for children. This coalition, inspired by John Dewey, Jerome Bruner, Maria Montessori and Lev Vygotsky, seek to transform schools in which learning comprises tediously absorbing large bodies of non-functional knowledge unconnected to life. They want schools in which teachers help students construct their own understanding.  Classroom learning has also been greatly influenced by growth of the internet and its World Wide Web resource stockpiles. Computer workstations that give students internet access increase the size of the available learning resources to consult and also the efficiency with which they can search huge chunks of literature for relevant references.

Although computers may be useful educational tools for quicker processing and analysis of information, they often present an opportunity for students to grow their leisure time and get away from learning tasks.

Educational tools or toys?

The potential for computers to facilitate learning is often met by a challenge of choosing what one may use from several applications on a computer. The standard desktop computer will come with word-processers, drawing applications and entertainment accessories like music and games. When the computer is connected to the internet, there are myriad opportunities for a student to access online games but also to link up with other people for a chat. When presented with a play arena and an opportunity to work out mathematics problems, the former is likely to become of secondary interest. A computer can be a collection of some of the most enticing distractions that easily overwhelms a teenage student who is still struggling to develop self-mastery.

Without appropriate guidance, many secondary (even university) students working away at a computer remain incapable of assessing the quality of the resources they have access to. Students using workstations with internet access are also susceptible to ‘pathological internet-use’ that could draw them into pornography or with the feeling that the internet is my only friend.

When computers are delivered to classrooms, they usually meet archrivals, the teachers.  Teachers are not always enthusiastic about altering their ways of working to accommodate new technology. Even though some teachers are willing to undergo training in the use of new learning support facilities, they rarely acquire pedagogic expertise to help them make the most effective use of ICT in their lessons.

Instead of new and bigger investments in computer infrastructure, schools should also invest in giving students skills that increasingly get neglected: writing and reasoning, reliable work habits, capacity for concentration and face-to-face communication. Computers are useless without primary material—ideas and concepts generated through dedicated study and thought; and this can only be done by human beings.

I’m of the view that learning mostly depends on what human beings, rather than computers, do best. The teacher may be the one to meet a most important need for the student—lighting a fire in the student’s heart, role modeling and nurturing as these can contribute more to learning now and in the future than the neatest hyper-linked courseware.