Achievement

• Achievement


  The development of motives, capabilities, interests, and behaviors that have to do with performance in evaluative situations
• Achievement as an Adolescent Issue

  • Time of preparation for adult work roles
  • Begin to appreciate individual differences in school performance as they relate to future success
  • Educational decisions are numerous and consequences of decisions are serious
• Achievement Motivation


  Extent to which an individual strives for success
• Fear of Failure


  Often manifested by feelings of anxiety
• High achievement motivation and low fear of failure


  Students will persist on challenge achievement situations
• Low achievement motivation and high fear of failure


  Students will dread and avoid challenging situations
• Underachievers


  Have low achievement motivation and high fear of failure<|>Tend to avoid and dread challenging situations<|>Grades are lower than expected based on ability
• Self-handicapping strategies


  Joking around, procrastination, turning in incomplete homework<|>Method of self-protection<|>Purposely appear uninterested in school to garner respect and have an excuse for poor performance
• Mastery motivation (intrinsic)


  Strive to achieve because of the internal pleasure they get out of learning and mastering the material
• Performance motivation (extrinsic)


  Strive to achieve because of external rewards or punishment for performance
• Individuals with strong mastery orientation


  Perform better in school (e.g., more confident about abilities, and more likely to persist in the face of failure)
• Recent research suggests a decline in mastery motivation during secondary school
• Stereotype threat


  Situational factors can affect students' beliefs about their abilities and subsequent performance
• Beliefs about abilities and chances for success and failure

  Influence behavior in achievement situations
• Factors that interact to predict students' behavior in school

  • Belief that intelligence is fixed or malleable
  • Mastery or performance orientation
  • Sense of self-efficacy
• Achievement attributions


  Explanations students give for their success or failure<|>Internal: ability or effort<|>External: task difficulty or luck
• Students high in achievement motivation

  Are likely to make internal attributions
• Learned helplessness


  The belief that failure is inevitable; related to external attributions
• Students' motivation and school performance decline when they move into secondary school
• Possible explanations for drop in motivation during transition to secondary school

  Shift toward a more performance-oriented style of instruction and evaluation<|>Elementary schools stress mastering the materials<|>Secondary schools place emphasis on achieving high grades
• Aspects of the home

  • Better predictors of academic achievement than the school environment
• Parents' values and expectations

  When parents have high expectations, adolescents come to expect a lot of themselves<|>When parents have low expectations, it leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy and poor achievement
• Authoritative Parenting


  Warm, firm, and fair<|>Linked to school success during adolescence
• Punitive, harsh, over-controlling, or inept parenting


  Lower school engagement and diminished achievement
• Cultural capital


  The resources provided within a family through the exposure of the adolescent to art, music, literature, and other elements of "high culture"
• Social capital


  The interpersonal resources available to an adolescent or family
• Although parents are stronger predictors of long term academic success, what adolescents do daily is more affected by friends
• Adolescents whose friends support academic achievement perform better in school than do peers whose friends disparage academic achievements
• High- and low-achieving students allocate their time spent studying and socializing differently


  • Figure 4
• Ways educational achievement is defined

  • School performance (grades earned)
  • Academic achievement (standardized test performance)
  • Educational attainment (years of schooling completed)
• Those with a college degree earn twice as much per year as those with only a high school diploma
• Compared to lower-class peers, middle-class adolescents score higher on basic tests of academic skills, earn higher grades in school, and complete more years of schooling
• Factors that impact achievement

  • Socioeconomic status
  • Ethnic differences
• Asian American students outperform all ethnic groups
• Immigrant paradox


  Foreign-born adolescents, as well as those who are children of immigrants, tend to be more cognitively engaged and achieve more in school than do minority youngsters who are second- or third-generation Americans
• High school dropouts are at risk for poverty, unemployment, dependence on government-subsidized income maintenance programs, becoming a teen parent, and delinquent and criminal activity
• Occupational achievement


  Process may parallel, or be a part of, identity development<|>Examination of one's traits, abilities, and interests<|>Experimentation with different work roles<|>Influenced by social environment<|>Process of choosing a career is a long one and may last well into adulthood
• Work values


  The sorts of rewards individuals seek from their work<|>Individuals choose jobs based on seven basic types of work rewards: extrinsic rewards, security, intrinsic rewards, influence, altruistic rewards, social rewards, and leisure
• Contemporary adolescents have unrealistic and overly ambitious ideas about these work rewards
• Educational achievement and occupational attainment are strongly influenced by socioeconomic status