As of today, it became a shared assumption among many educators that the one of foremost keys to ensuring a particular high school student’s reading proficiency is providing him/her with the appropriate set of incentives to strive to excel in reading (Shuman, 2006).
In their turn, these incentives are usually being concerned with motivating students by the mean of making appeals to their sense of rationale, on the one hand, and by the mean of exposing them to the prospect of an academic punishment, in case they fail remaining fully committed to studying, on the other.
In this paper, I will analyze and comment on two studies, the authors of which had conducted a research on the subject of what may account for the qualitative essence of an interrelation between the low level of reading proficiency, on the part of high school students, and the affiliated levels of academic discipline in these students’ schools.
The foremost thesis that is being explored throughout the entirety of Guthrie, Coddington, and Wigfield’s (2009) study, is that the particulars of students’ racial affiliation do affect the qualitative subtleties of their academic attitude towards reading-related tasks.
Whereas, the extent of Caucasian students’ reading proficiency appears to correlate with the measure of their perceptional sensitivity to the affiliated intrinsic motivations, the African-American students’ varying ability to excel in addressing different reading-tasks appears to be indicative of the teachers’ ability to expose these students to the environmentally appropriate external reading-enhancing incentives.
The implications of Guthrie, Coddington, and Wigfield’s study are clear. As opposed to what it is being the case with Caucasian students, African-American students will be much more likely to benefit from improving their reading skills in the thoroughly disciplined academic environment, because it is specifically ensuring these students’ ‘reading non-avoidance’, which authors exposed to be the most effective method of increasing the level of Black students’ reading proficiency, “A non-avoidant, disciplined, conscientious reading for school purposes reaped more rewards in achievement for African American students than for Caucasian students” (2009, p. 346).
Nevertheless, even though Guthrie, Coddington, and Wigfield’s study does offer a few qualitative insights into the researched subject matter, the authors had failed at specifying what may account for the effective methodology of increasing the extent of reading proficiency, on the part on Caucasian students, on the one hand, and on the part of African-American students, on the other.
This study’s apparent drawback, however, should not be thought as the indication of authors’ lessened analytical abilities. Even though that the earlier mentioned study contains an extensive empirical evidence as to the fact that the factor of race plays a significant role in how students go about addressing their reading-related academic assignments, this evidence is being discursively inconsistent with the foremost theoretical premise, upon which the educational approaches in today’s Western countries are being based – namely, the assumption that the particulars of students’ racial affiliation do not even slightly affect their cognitive predispositions.
Had the findings of Guthrie, Coddington, and Wigfield’s study been taken into consideration by educational policy-makers, teachers would end up being officially encouraged to adopt a much stronger disciplinarian approach towards African-American students, as the foremost mean of encouraging them to work on improving their reading skills. This, however, would automatically result in these teachers being accused of racism.
The validity of this suggestion can be well substantiated in regards to the ideas, contained in Gregory and Thompson’s (2010) study. In it, the authors provide readers with the politically correct interpretation of why ill-disciplined students (specifically African-American) exhibit significantly lower rates of academic achievement, extrapolated in their lowered ability to succeed in addressing reading-related tasks, as compared to what it is being the case with their well-disciplined peers.
After having studied the subtleties of 35 African-American underachieving students’ attitude towards reading, the authors came to a conclusion that the actual reason why many of these students have been described by their teachers as ill-disciplined and uncooperative, is that teachers had failed at adjusting the deployed learning strategies to these students’ psychological needs, “Students who reported unfair treatment with a particular teacher were more likely to receive a discipline referral and be perceived as defiant and uncooperative by that teacher” (387).
In other words, Gregory and Thompson imply that, even though there is indeed a positive correlation between the concerned students’ lessened ability to adhere to the provisions of an institutional discipline and their lessened ability to excel in addressing reading-related tasks, it would be inappropriate to consider these two lessened abilities as such that organically derive out of each other.
After all, according to the authors, the extent of students’ academic uncooperativeness, which is being commonly discussed in regards to what appears to be the varying measure of students’ emotional comfortableness with the conventions of a particular disciplinary code, is not an objective category.
This is because, the factor of ethnocultural biasness, on the part of teachers, inevitably affects the way in which they perceive the observable emanations of students’ uncooperativeness, “Teachers’ interpretation of behavior may be affected by implicit racial bias, which operates out of conscious awareness” (p. 397).
In its turn, this has led Gregory and Thompson to conclude that there are no objective reasons to believe that students’ discipline-related problems and their reading-related academic underachievement do interrelate in any qualitative manner.
Nevertheless, despite the Gregory and Thompson study’s apparent progressiveness, the line of argumentation, deployed throughout the study, appears conceptually fallacious, because it denies any objective validity to the notion of ‘discipline’, by definition.
After all, if the factor of ethno-cultural biasness necessarily affects teachers’ attitude towards what they consider the observable manifestations of students’ undisciplined behavior, then there can be no rational reasons to consider imposing behavioral rules and regulations on these students, in the first place.
As a result, it would be only the matter of time, before high schools will end up being engulfed by a complete educational chaos. The actual realities of a learning process in many American high schools, where educators make a deliberate point in excluding the word ‘discipline’ out of their lexicon as utterly ‘euro-centric’ and therefore ‘evil’, substantiate the validity of this suggestion.
Nowadays, it does not represent much of a secret that, as time goes on; the academic standards in Western countries continue to sink ever lower. The review of two earlier mentioned studies, provides us with the partial insight as why this may be the case.
Apparently, it is not only that there is indeed a dialectically predetermined link between students’ reading-related underachievement and the high amount of discipline problems they experience in their classes, but there is also a link between the process of more and more students growing progressively ‘dumb’ and the officially institutionalized policy of denying the objectiveness to the very concept of discipline.
References
Curry, J. (2010). Addressing the spiritual needs of African American students: Implications for school counselors. The Journal of Negro Education, 79 (3), 405-415.
Gregory, A. & Thompson, A. (2010). African American high school students and variability in behavior across classrooms. Journal of Community Psychology, 38 (3), 386-402.
Guthrie, J., Coddington, C. & Wigfield, A. (2009). Profiles of reading motivation among African American and Caucasian students. Journal of Literacy Research, 41 (3), 317-353.
Shuman, B. (2006). A school-wide attack on reading problems. The Clearing House, 79 (5), 219-222.