Educational Psychology / Unit 9 EDP 0823 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Explaining Group Differences
The idea
Differences between groups of students, by gender, culture, language or class, invite explanation, and the evidence supports some explanations far more than others. Gender differences in cognitive abilities are mostly small and shrinking, far smaller than the variation within each gender, and a presumed difference in spatial skill disappeared with practice. Teachers' own interactions differ by gender in ways they can change. Cultural differences in language use and in independent or interdependent selves are real tendencies, but they are easily misread as deficits. Ogbu's theory that involuntary-minority students reject school success is one explanation, and it is contested. Socioeconomic status has a medium to strong relation with achievement, yet some of the gap reflects experience that can be supplied: about an hour of a numerical board game raised low-income children's number knowledge. The famous word-gap claim is contested, with high variability within income groups.
In practice
Worked example: a school notices that its low-income students and its English learners score lower on a mathematics test. One explanation blames the students' cultures or families. The school looks elsewhere first. It checks whether its teachers call on all students equally, whether known-answer questioning is confusing some newcomers, and whether students have had experience with numbers before school. It adds number games in kindergarten, teaches English learners in an additive bilingual program, and audits its classroom interaction. It does not conclude that any student's group sets a limit on that student's learning.
Where people slip
A group difference in averages is a fact about a group, not a destiny for its members. Much of the evidence in this unit points to experience, interaction and opportunity, which teachers can influence. Contested explanations, such as oppositional identity and the word gap, should be named as contested and never used to predict an individual student's behavior.
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