Even though the achievement gap between low-income black and Latino children and their white counterparts has grabbed national headlines, education researchers A. Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera point out that not all minorities are failing. Boykin and Noguera offer strategies for increasing minority students' engagement and boosting their levels of achievement, and they discuss their ASCD book Creating the Opportunity to Learn: Moving from Research to Practice to Close the Achievement Gap.
The minority achievement gap has been a persistent and well-documented issue in education. Citing previous research, Boykin and Noguera point out that even in schools with integrated populations of white, black, and Latino students, where in-school education opportunities are presumed to be equitable, the gap persists. James Byrne's 2003 study showed that about a quarter of white students will achieve at or above the 80th percentile in math proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, while only 3 percent of their minority counterparts will score as high.
"Many black and Latino children from low-income backgrounds come to school with less developed academic skills because their parents tend to have less formal education," Noguera explains. "Since the parent (particularly the mother) is typically a child's first teacher, this places poor children of color at a disadvantage unless they attend schools that are aware of their needs."
However, Noguera adds, "It should be noted that these children generally bring other strengths that can be utilized to facilitate their acquisition of formal academic skills." Classroom teachers especially can build a greater awareness of the personalities, cultural backgrounds, and interests of each of their students—to see them as individuals rather than reducing or dismissing them, even unwittingly, as racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic stereotypes.
After examining decades of research on efforts to close the minority achievement gap, Boykin and Noguera propose that the crucial elements necessary for students to achieve are student engagement; students' self-efficacy and ability to set goals and improve themselves; and a positive classroom environment, in which the teacher builds on what students already know while leading them to think deeply about content.
The authors say that current research has shown less evidence of these academic success factors among many black and Latino students. However, when daily classroom teaching and learning successfully target these areas, say Boykin and Noguera, minority achievement gaps begin to close, even as students across the board achieve at higher levels.
Increase Student Engagement
- Behavioral engagement is "on-task" behavior in class that includes persistence, asking questions, taking part in discussions, and knowing when to ask for help when they are stuck.
- Cognitive engagement can be seen when students show deep involvement and effort to understand a challenging concept or issue or acquire a difficult skill.
- Affective engagement manifests itself through a student's high interest level, positive affect and attitude, curiosity, and task involvement.
According to Boykin and Noguera's research review, student engagement was a more significant factor than the amount of instructional time or structural factors, such as student-teacher ratio, in students' achievement in math and reading. Moreover, studies generally show that teachers respond more positively to students who are already engaged than to those who are not. This teacher behavior tends to enhance the subsequent engagement of highly engaged students and diminish the engagement of the unengaged, who may further act out through avoidance tactics, such as procrastinating, not trying, avoiding help, choosing low-demand problems, and guessing at answers.
Research about interpersonal relationships in the classroom emphasizes that both the quality and number of positive interactions between teachers and their students is a predictor of achievement in reading and math. Boykin and Noguera point to another study that shows the effect of an approach called warm-demander pedagogy: the study found that black and Latino students were especially responsive, and thus more likely to be engaged in learning, when teachers' demands were conveyed with compassion, support, and nurturance.
Strengthen Student Self-Efficacy, Goal Setting, and Self-Improvement
Among the skills that have an effect on closing the academic achievement gap, Boykin and Noguera note, are those in the areas of self-efficacy ("I can do this task"), goal setting, and a belief that working hard at an intellectual task will result in mastery. Self-regulated learning is an important companion to self-efficacy, and it is seen in students' ability to set realistic learning goals, monitor their progress, and evaluate how well they are accomplishing the goals.
Boykin and Noguera examined a variety of studies that showed that when students received training in self-regulated learning practices, their performance improved in math, reading, and writing. For example, one study of 5th graders—90 percent of whom were black from low-income families—found that training students in goal setting, self-monitoring, and self-reinforcement improved their reading skills more than those of students who received more generic reading-strategy instruction.
Studies have also shown that "fading," or giving students a strategy for internalizing the self-regulating learning practices (i.e., modeling by the teacher and then the student verbalizing aloud, at a whisper, and finally mentally while performing various phases) can help students make the strategies their own.
Build a Positive Classroom
Positive classroom dynamics between teachers and students are important in developing a culture of learning in which students see themselves as having a significant role to play, say Boykin and Noguera.
"Many children encounter failure and negative sanctions very early in their school experience," Noguera explains. "This leads many children to become turned off and to disassociate with school—and sometimes with learning. By building on their strengths and interests, students develop positive feelings toward school and learning, which in turn creates an openness and willingness to become active participants in their education."
For example, the authors point to research that showed that the performance of black 5th and 6th graders improved when teachers personalized learning by using "you" or the students' names, likes, or other personal information in a math word problem.
Another element educators can use to leverage learning and produce better student engagement with content is culture. For example, in one study, researcher Carol Lee helped black students in Chicago, Ill., who were failing English literature transfer their understanding of metaphor, symbolism, irony, and other literary devices in the lyrics of popular songs to literary texts in the academic realm.
Help Children Prioritize Mental Effort
The idea of information processing may seem more linked to computer number crunching and database retrieval than the organic working of the human brain, but attaining a better understanding of certain mental operations and how they work together can help educators focus on the ones their students need to acquire to be better learners. Such mental operations take many forms, including the act of memorizing and recalling facts, applying known information and skills to new knowledge or situations, drawing inferences, evaluating information, and applying abstract principles.
Boykin and Noguera note that research supports the importance of reducing the cognitive load placed on students' working memory by helping them process information routinely, which is a process education researchers call automaticity. Automaticity could come from memorizing times tables or reading frequently so that the work of decoding words is easier.
Although rote learning and memorization play an important role in freeing up students' mental processing space, it also happens when students are taught to discern patterns or regularities in the problems or texts they are expected to master. From an early age, children's exposure to basic academic concepts can help them assimilate subsequent learning more quickly.
For example, Boykin and Noguera point to research that showed preschool children from low-income backgrounds did not understand the concept of the number line—a horizontal line marked by evenly spaced units and numerals used to visualize adding and subtracting units. When researchers gave students practice with numerical board games that allowed them to move a token up or down a certain number of spaces based on the toss of a pair of dice, children gained a firmer grasp of the number line and number estimation, reducing the differences in their math understanding and skills in comparison to those of more affluent children.
Know Every Child
Academic achievement among black and Latino students from low-income backgrounds can improve when educators engage students with the content and also provide ways for students to see themselves as agents in their own learning. That requires educators to know each student's strengths and needs in terms of academic skills and outlooks. Arriving at that knowledge is easier when a teacher knows who each child is.
"The more students are engaged, the more self-confident they become, or the more they come to believe that their intelligence is not fixed," Boykin says. "The more [students] become self-regulated learners, the more effective they are at information processing. And the more engaged they are, the more this will foster positive teacher-student relationships—or the more opportunities they will have to link what they are learning to their cultural or personal experiences."
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