Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Summer Theme

Since reading and studying inspires writing, I am not sure how much blogging I will do this summer. In addition to summer fiction reading, I will probably read articles about resilience and attachment. Reading, learning and talking about resilience makes me feel good (happy, hopeful and wise) which is good for summer reading. And everything begins and ends with attachment theory.

To start things off...

"Social learning theories posit that the earliest and most salient influence on children is the home environment because family management skills, discipline techniques, and monitoring strategies are crucial factors impacting youth development."

"Research has demonstrated that parenting behaviors and family relationships are strongly related to student engagement, which appears to be a consistent finding across ethnic and socioeconomic groups"

"In terms of parenting behaviors, the authoritative parenting style is positively related to multiple dimensions of student engagement. Longitudinal research demonstrates that authoritative parenting leads to student engagement, as indicated by improvements in school engagement (i.e., classroom engagement, school orientation, bonding to teachers, school conduct) over a 1-year period in children with authoritative parents compared to children with nonauthoritative parents. Thus, parents who combine high levels of acceptance, supervision, consistent discipline, and democracy promote student engagement compared to those who do not exhibit these parenting behaviors."

From Relations among School Assets, Individual Resilience, and Student Engagement for Youth Grouped by Level of Family Functioning, Jill Sharkey, Sukkyung You, and Katrina Schnoebelen, Psychology in the Schools, 2008.

2 comments:

  1. If only conventional schools would also "combine high levels of acceptance, supervision, consistent discipline, and democracy promote student engagement" as well, we might not be seeing surveys showing that over half the kids in public school are not engaged in their education.


    I don't think the primary reason for that is family dynamics. I think it is more about the regimented, highly hierachical school dynamics between administrators, teachers and students, which give teachers little say in the process and students practically none at all.

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  2. I think it is both - school and family. I think this study aimed to explore what schools could do to foster student engagement and found that regardless of family functioning, from high to low, school assets made a difference for students.

    I agree that we could use more "acceptance, supervision, consistent discipline and democracy" at home and at school.

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