RIZKI
IKA YUNI PRIHATINI
11050
059
The
Fourth Semester of English Education
The
Final Task of Ex. Reading
WHAT MAKES KIDS SUCCEED IN SCHOOL?
In just about every classroom, it’s easy to pick out certain
children who are clearly doing great. You might expect them to all look the
same, but in fact, these kids come in all shapes, sizes, and temperaments. Yet
together, they radiate similar good feelings about school. Happy and alert,
they seem at home with themselves, their classmates, and the teacher.
How does it happen? The question
is almost a holy grail for parents, teachers, and researchers. After all, no
one wants to see a child fail in school.
Sharon and Craig Ramey, both
Ph.D. professors at Georgetown and respected leaders in child development, have
some answers, based on over twenty-five years of research across the United
States. In their book, Going to School, they offer “Ten Hallmarks of
Children Who Succeed.” Each one, they stress, is a “dynamic process that can be
positively influenced by parents.” Do these traits look familiar?
Children who succeed in school:
- Are “eager to learn.” From earliest childhood, parents and community have offered interesting things to explore, and have encouraged curiosity.
- Pursue learning. This means they ask questions, and they seek help. When they get stuck, they know that adults are on hand to help—and that it’s worth asking.
- Put effort into their work. Parents can convey the message that if kids try hard, the results will pay off. These kids are proud of effort, and they don’t give up.
- Use solid emotional and social skills. School is full of emotional and social challenge, as kids handle friends, authority, and group dynamics. Parents can help by supporting kids in making good decisions and being generous friends.
- Have an accurate view of their own knowledge and skills. Parents help when they celebrate their children just as they are, neither less nor more, while still encouraging high hopes and dreams.
- Look to parents as role models for learning. This does not mean that parents must be perfect—it means they must be real, and they must be willing to be learners sometimes too.
- Have homes that “promote learning by natural teaching.” This doesn’t require that Bach be piped into the nursery or abstract mathematics be taught in the sandbox. It means that parents talk, explain, name and count everyday things and experiences, helping kids learn and make meaning.
- Follow helpful family routines. Kids can count on regular meals, baths, and sleep times. When it’s time for school, they’re ready to go.
- Know that rules count. Parents help by setting clear limits and boundaries - “authoritative” rather than too strict or too lax.
- Attend schools with “high expectations,” strong and effective staff development, and good communication about kids’ progress. Whatever the age of the child, parents can help by modeling good communication, and by staying in close touch with teachers and school staff.
Rocket science? No. Easy? Not
necessarily! As the Rameys will readily admit, lots of devoted parents may
still find themselves stumped by kids who struggle in school. And many students
can succeed just fine without having every single hallmark. But if parents can
actively promote the items on this list, they promise that everyone in a family
benefits, especially your school-age child.
MARZERI TURANGGA MUSLIM
11050052
IV B
When Children Fail in School: Understanding Learned Helplessness
Learned
helplessness is the belief that our own behavior does not influence what
happens next; that is, behavior does not control outcomes or results. For
example, when a student believes that she is in charge of the outcome, she may
think, “If I study hard for this test, I’ll get a good grade.” On the contrary,
a learned helpless student thinks, “No matter how hard I study for this test,
I’ll always get a bad grade.” In school, learned helplessness relates to poor
grades and underachievement, and to behavior difficulties. Students who
experience repeated school failure are particularly prone to develop a learned
helpless response style. Because of repeated academic failure, these students
begin to doubt their own abilities, leading them to doubt that they can do
anything to overcome their school difficulties. Consequently, they decrease
their achievement efforts, particularly when faced with difficult materials,
which leads to more school failure. This pattern of giving up when facing
difficult tasks reinforces the child’s belief that he or she cannot overcome
his or her academic difficulties.
Learned
helplessness seems to contribute to the school failure experienced by many
students with a learning disability. In a never-ending cycle, children with a
learning disability frequently experience school difficulties over an extended
period, and across a variety of tasks, school settings, and teachers, which in
turn reinforces the child’s feeling of being helpless.
Characteristics
of Learned Helpless Students
Some
characteristics of learned helpless children are:
1.
Low motivation to learn, and diminished aspirations to succeed in school.
2.
Low outcome expectations; that is, they believe that, no matter what they do in
school, the outcome will always be negative (e.g. bad grades). In addition,
they believe that they are powerless to prevent or overcome a negative outcome.
3.
Lack of perceived control over their own behavior and the environmental events;
one’s own actions cannot lead to success.
4.
Lack of confidence in their skills and abilities (low self-efficacy
expectations). These children believe that their school difficulties are caused
by their own lack of ability and low intelligence, even when they have adequate
ability and normal intelligence. They are convinced that they are unable to
perform the required actions to achieve a positive outcome.
5.
They underestimate their performance when they do well in school, attributing
success to luck or chance, e.g., “I was lucky that this test was easy.”
6.
They generalize from one failure situation or experience to other situations
where control is possible. Because they expect failure all the time, regardless
of their real skills and abilities, they underperform all the time.
7.
They focus on what they cannot do, rather than focusing on their strengths and
skills.
8.
Because they feel incapable of implementing the necessary courses of action,
they develop passivity and their school performance deteriorates.
The
Pessimistic Explanatory Style
Learned helpless
students, perceive school failure as something that they will never overcome,
and academic events, positive or negative, as something out of their control.
This expectation of failure and perceived lack of control is central in the
development of a learned helpless style. The way in which children perceive and
interpret their experiences in the classroom helps us understand why some
children develop an optimistic explanatory style, and believe that they
are capable of achieving in school and others develop a pessimistic
explanatory style, believing that they are not capable of succeeding in
school (Seligman, Reivich, Jaycox, and Gilham, 1995).
Children with an
optimistic explanatory style attribute school failure to momentary and specific
circumstances; for example, “I just happened to be in the wrong place at the
wrong time.” Children with a pessimistic explanatory style explain negative
events as something stable (the cause of the negative event will always
be present), global (the cause of the negative event affects all areas
of their lives), and internal (they conclude that they are responsible
for the outcome or consequence of the negative event). A typical pessimistic
explanatory style is, “I always fail no matter what I do.” On the contrary,
when the outcome of the event is positive, a pessimistic child attributes the
outcome to unstable (the cause of the event is transitory), specific
(the cause of the event is situation specific), and external (other
people or circumstances are responsible for the outcome) causes.
Learned
Helpless Students Need Learning Strategies
Due to this perceived lack of control of the negative event,
a learned helpless child is reluctant to seek assistance or help when he is
having difficulty performing an academic task. These children are ineffective
in using learning strategies, and they do not know how to engage
in strategic task behavior to solve academic problems. For example, learned
helpless children are unaware that if they create a plan, use a checklist,
and/or make drawings, it will be easier for them to solve a multistep math word
problem. With learned helpless children, success alone (e.g. solving accurately
the multistep problem), is not going to ease the helpless perception or boost
their self-confidence; remember that these children attribute their specific
successes to luck or chance. According to Eccles, Wigfield, and Schiefele
(1998), trying to persuade a learned helpless child that she can succeed, and
asking her just to try hard, will be ineffective if we do not teach the child
specific learning and compensatory strategies that she can apply to improve her
performance when facing a difficult task. The authors state that the key in
helping a learned helpless child overcome this dysfunctional explanatory
pattern is to provide strategy
retraining (teaching her strategies to use, and teaching explicitly when
she can use those strategies), so that we give the child specific ways to
remedy achievement problems; coupled with attribution retraining, or creating and maintaining a success
expectation. When we teach a learned helpless child to use learning strategies,
we are giving her the tools she needs to develop and maintain the perception
that she has the resources to reverse failure. Ames (1990) recommends that, in
combination with the learning strategies, we help the learned helpless child
develop individualized short-term goals, e.g., “I will make drawings to
accurately solve a two-steps math word problem.” When the child knows and
implements learning strategies, she will be able to experience progress toward her
individualized goals.
Learned Helpless Students Need to Believe that Effort
Increases Skills
To accomplish
this, we need to help learned helpless children recognize and take credit for
the skills and abilities that they already have. In addition, we need to
develop in children the belief that ability is incremental, not fixed; that is,
effort increases ability and skills. Tollefson (2000) recommends that we help
children see success as improvement;
that is, we are successful when we acquire or refine knowledge and skills we
did not have before. We need to avoid communicating children that, to succeed
in school, they need to perform at a particular level, or they need to perform
at the same level than other students. When we help children see success as improvement,
states Tollefson, we are encouraging them to expend effort to remediate their
academic difficulties. In addition, we are training them to focus on strategies
and the process of learning, rather than outcomes and achievement.
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