What Doesn't Meet the Eye

Why Students Work Hard

An adequately ambitious, multidimensional strategy to close racial and ethnic gaps in academic knowledge and skill would have many components. It would focus relentlessly on ideas and activities geared to produce learning. It would have roles for teachers, parents, administrators, students, and others, including policymakers. Among the things it might ask of black, Hispanic, and mixed-race adolescents is that they should devote more time and effort to their studies than they currently do, even if they already work as much, on average, as white classmates. This increase in effort is unlikely to occur without approaches to instruction that push students toward higher goals and make achieving those goals both feasible and rewarding.

The prospect of needing to increase effort levels brings us to the question of whether particular strategies for eliciting more effort from students are likely to be more effective than others. Some insight in this regard comes from student responses to the following question in the Ed-Excel survey: "When you work really hard in school, which of the following reasons are most important to you? (Mark as many as apply to you.)" For each of 14 items, students could darken a bubble indicating that the item is important or they could leave the bubble blank.

Table 6 shows student responses by race/ethnicity, ranked in order from the item that received the most responses to the item that received the least. For most items, the rank order from top to bottom is the same for all race/ethnic groups and the percentage of the group indicating that any given item is important does not differ greatly across groups. For example, the top item among all groups is "I need the grades to get into college." The percentage of students indicating that this reason is important ranges from 71 percent of Hispanic students to 81 percent of Asians. White, black, and mixed-race students are nearly identical in their responses, at 78 percent of whites, 77 percent of blacks, and 77 percent of mixed-race students. The percentage marking "to please or impress my parents" occupies a narrow range from 61 percent of whites to 64 percent of Asians. Regarding the extrinsic goals of preparing for good jobs and tough college courses, whites rank lowest and Asians rank highest. For the more intrinsically oriented purposes—specifically, "I want to learn the material" and "the subject is interesting"—group differences are very small. For most items in Table 6, no group stands out. The similarities are remarkable.

However, there are two items that show quite interesting race/ethnic differences, especially when considered together.²⁴ Specifically, when compared to whites, black and Hispanic students are more likely to indicate "my teachers encourage me to work hard" as a motivational factor and less likely to identify "the teacher demands it." Blacks are three times as likely to endorse encouragement as they are to cite teacher demands; 47 percent of blacks identify teacher encouragement as an important motivator, compared to 15 percent for teacher demands. Hispanics are two times as likely to cite encouragement (41 percent) compared to demands (19 percent), and whites are likely to cite each roughly equally (31 percent for encouragement and 29 percent for demands). Asians (31 percent for encouragement and 20 percent for demands) and mixed-race students (37 percent for encouragement and 24 percent for demands) fall between the patterns for whites on one side versus blacks and Hispanics on the other.

Responses regarding demands and encouragement are mostly unrelated to measures of SES.²⁵ As Table 7 shows, no matter how many parents students live with or how many years of schooling the mother has attained, race/ethnic differences in the relative importance of encouragement follow the same basic pattern. Not shown is that responses also are unrelated to the study's other measures of socioeconomic background.

I have not studied precisely what teachers' statements, demeanors, and behaviors are interpreted by students in MSAN districts as demanding or encouraging and whether these differ by race and ethnicity. I have, however, asked a few black and Hispanic students in MSAN schools to help me understand these findings concerning encouragement and demands. Concerning demands, they have very little to say. However, they have a great deal to say about encouragement. One student says, "I find it encouraging when teachers tell me I 'can do it' and when they don't make judgments about why I haven't done something that I was supposed to." Another says, "I find it encouraging when teachers give me full explanations to help me understand things, instead of short 'yes' or 'no' answers." A third student says, "I find it encouraging when teachers stay after school to give me extra help and don't seem like they're in a big hurry to go [home]." Based on these and other anecdotal observations, encouragement seems to entail assurances from teachers that students have the ability to succeed and teacher behaviors that provide active support for success. Conversely, a demand is an order to submit to the power of the person making the demand and carries no assurance that the person making the demand really cares about the student or will offer any special assistance. Especially for students of color, survey responses indicate that teacher demands are probably not very effective.

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