Chapter 10: A Motivational Perspective on School Achievement: Taking Responsibility for Learning, Teaching, and Supporting

Understanding individual and group differences in school achievement is critical to designing educational environments that maximize each student’s learning. Scholars from many different disciplines have worked on increasing this understanding. In this chapter, I focus on a subset of factors linked to expectancy-value theories of achievement motivation and task engagement, stressing the importance of these factors in explaining race and ethnic group differences in school achievement within the United States. On average, students from African American, Hispanic, and Native American families perform more poorly than children from Asian American and European American families throughout their school careers (Berry & Asamen, 1989). Many explanations have been offered for these differences (see Connell, Halpern-Felsher, Clifford, Crichlow, & Usinger, 1995; Connell, Spencer, & Aber, 1994; Lee & Smith, 2001). I believe that at least part of the difference lies in the impact of discriminatory experiences at school both on students’ confidence in their own ability to master the school material (the expectancy component of expectancy-value models) and on the value they place on being fully engaged in the learning tasks provided in their schools. It is very unlikely that students will decide to take responsibility for their own learning if they believe their teachers lack confidence in their academic abilities due to their race or ethnic group. It is also unlikely that they will take responsibility for their own learning if they themselves come to place little value on being fully engaged in the learning agenda of their schools because of racial discriminatory experiences at school. I elaborate this argument throughout the chapter and discuss one set of ethnic-identity-related constructs that have been shown to help these young people cope with discriminatory experiences in school and suggest ways that schools might help to support these protective psychological processes.