How do we help students from disadvantaged backgrounds feel confident about school?

By Rebecca J. Collie, Andrew J. Martin, UNSW Sydney

Research shows that students who are confident about their ability to succeed at school tend to be more academically successful.

Researchers call the thoughts, actions and emotions behind this confidence “academic agency”. Essentially, it is about students’ sense they are able to do particular things that will help them succeed at school. This might involve perseverance with study, coping with tough experiences (such as exam nerves), and following school rules.

Previous research has suggested students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds tend to be less confident about school than students from high-socioeconomic backgrounds for various reasons, including fewer resources at home and less access to technology.

But this is not always the case.

Our recent study, published in Social Psychology of Education, looked at what makes students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds confident about their schooling.

Our research

To measure students’ confidence, we looked at survey responses from more than 20,000 students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds from 421 New South Wales government schools.

The responses came from the NSW Education Department’s “Tell Them From Me” survey, which measures student engagement and wellbeing.

The study enabled us to look at five different indicators of academic confidence: students’ sense of being capable at schoolwork; feeling they belong at school; perseverance in schoolwork; ability to bounce back from challenges; and appropriate behaviour at school.

We used students’ scores on these indicators to categorise them into confident “profiles” or low-confidence “profiles”.

To measure academic achievement, we looked at students’ NAPLAN scores in reading and numeracy.

Our findings

Around half of the students we studied had confident profiles. This meant students reported average-to-high levels on the five confidence indicators.

Importantly, their levels within these confidence indicators were similar to or higher than averages found among students from medium-socioeconomic or high-socioeconomic backgrounds in a broader sample as part of our wider research.

These findings suggest there is a significant share of students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds who are thriving in terms of their academic confidence.

Our findings also showed students in confident profiles had high levels of academic achievement.

Full Story https://theconversation.com/how-do-we-help-students-from-disadvantaged-backgrounds-feel-confident-about-school-222895