The focus on academic achievement is intense in today’s classroom culture. We’ve seen kindergartners with private tutors, and a major push for test score improvement throughout the country. Constantly assessing and reassessing students’ mastery of content is daily business for teachers, in order to measure students’ individual academic deficits.

But there seems to be a trend of measuring another side of students as well -- a student’s emotional, behavioral, and attitudinal strengths and weaknesses. The question is whether these factors can determine where a student stands in terms of academic success.

One example of this is the New York Times article last month titled, “What if the Key to Success is Failure?” The article spotlighted a school that had incorporated character traits like optimism and grit into the curriculum.

Another example is the ENGAGE component of the ACT exam, which launched this past year. The ACT test is most known as an exam that students take when applying to college. The ENGAGE component is available for middle school and high school students and measures three areas: Motivation, Social Engagement, and Self-Regulation.

The test website reads, “ACT developed ENGAGE to measure students' behaviors and psychosocial attributes, which are critical but often overlooked components of their success. Backed by our enduring expertise in research, ENGAGE can predict—with a remarkable degree of accuracy—how likely each of your students is to graduate high school, and whether they will earn at least a 2.0 GPA.” (See the chart of behavioral characteristics here.)

Youth Radio reached out to Daisuke Akibe, Associate Professor of Child Development, Educational Psychology, & Urban Education at Queens College in New York, who said she is happy to see this increased emphasis on individual psychological factors.

However, she says, “I am not really sure if I am comfortable with the notion of ‘measuring’ the attitudinal and other ‘fuzzy’ psychological characteristics...let alone using them to predict future academic achievements.” Akibe said there is traditionally a divide between education researchers who have long subscribed to the notion, If we can set the environment ‘correctly,’ all kids can learn,” and psychology researchers who have emphasized individual characteristics like temperament, and the ability to delay gratification, in an academic context.

By Alvin Duncan

The aim of most youth is self-acceptance but it seems they always fall short during the process. They compare themselves to the images in music, television and movies.
Music example such as its an ok thing to degrade women, go head to head with the 5 0 and use profanity, TV example: it’s a cool thing to drop out of high school and start food fights at school and movie example drinking having sex and using drugs is the thing to do. They set limits for themselves based off the images they see. Read more...

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