Chapter 7: Resilience and Risk in Learning: Complex Interactions and Comprehensive Interventions

The pendulum of education reform swings widely, and sometimes wildly depending on prevailing views about factors that affect the achievements of school-age children. As early as the mid-19th century, Francis Galton argued that hereditary factors determine one’s biologically ordained intelligence quotient (IQ) (Robinson, 1976). This argument has a long history and was advanced most recently in the controversial book The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). The book has been challenged on methodological, theoretical, and philosophical bases, and the nature–nurture debate, particularly when it centers on race and gender, is likely to continue into the future.

In the 1960s, following the research reported by James Coleman and colleagues (1966), socioeconomic variables and factors associated with families were identified as the most influential in affecting school achievement. Coleman’s report deemphasized the effects of classroom factors (e.g., teachers, curriculum, class size) on achievement, and one can surmise that this report was influential in moving psychological research away from classrooms. In the words of Coleman and his colleagues, “When the socioeconomic background of the students is taken into account...it appears that differences between schools account for only a small fraction of differences in pupil achievement” (pp. 21–22).