Ethnicity, Gender and Age: Predicting Resilience and Academic Achievement among Urban High School Students

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study evaluated urban student protective factors predicting resilience and academic achievement. A questionnaire was used to gather the data from 480 high school students. Findings suggested that ethnicity, gender, and age influenced protective factors predicting resilience and academic achievement. It was concluded that there is need for attention to non-instructional aspects of schooling. Schools, parents, community and peers should provide students with care, support, and opportunities for participation in activities that promote social bonding and life skills. Urban schools educate the majority of students who are at risk of school failure. Many of these children are ignored, while others suffer the humiliation of labels such as retarded, disabled, socially or emotionally disturbed, educationally deficient, or culturally disadvantaged (Wang, 1996). With stakes raised even higher in the No Child Left Behind Act, urban schools face more challenges to enable each student to succeed. Helping students become resilient learners who assume responsibility for acquiring knowledge and skills and sustains a pattern of self-directed lifelong learning is needed now more than ever (Wang & Palinscar, 1989, p.71). Resilience is critical to urban students because they have been found to experience significantly higher school stress and significantly lower social support from family, friends, and school personnel (Wenz-Gross & Parker, 1999). Resilience may provide students with the to endure in school. Resilience is the capacity of individuals to overcome personal vulnerabilities and environmental adversities effectively or the ability to thrive physically and psychologically despite adverse circumstances (Wang, Haertel, & Walberg, 1994). Resilient children exhibit verbal fluency, sense of competence, and good problem solving skills. They have high self-esteem, self-control, malleability, even temper, and openness to new experiences. Resilient children also set goals, maintain healthy expectations and have a clear sense of purpose (Benard, 1996; Wang, et. al, 1994; WestEd, 2000). Resilient children have abilities and adaptive characteristics that enable them to improve their health, social, and academic outcomes. Unlike social economic status, which teachers, parents, peers, and community cannot influence, resilience is represented by the different innate capacities that all children possess. Resilience is influenced by the environment, and may be used to exploit positive features of the environment for positive outcomes (Wang et al, 1998). It is not a genetic trait that only a few children possess (Benard, 1996). As such, resilience may provide some solutions to improving quality of life and education for urban and minority youth. Resilience studies may also counteract and change negative attitudes of those who believe that nothing can overcome the backgrounds of students. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The major tenet of the youth resilience approach is that resilience is a for healthy development and academic achievement. Resilient students are motivated to meet their human needs for love, belonging, respect, identity, power, mastery, challenge, and meaning. When students experience home, school, peer and community environments rich in the developmental supports and opportunities of caring relationships, high expectations, and opportunities for meaningful participation, they develop individual characteristics that define resilience and successful learning. WestEd (2000) has described this framework as The Youth Development Conceptual Model (YDCM). Based on this framework, the study determined which protective factors predicted resilience and academic achievement among urban high school students. Figure 1 (WestEd, 2000) illustrates the YDCM framework on which this study was based. Although researchers have documented the impact of socio-economic status on academic achievement (Caldas, 1993; Coleman, 1966; Jencks, 1973; Rumberg & Williams, 1992), a growing body of research focusing on healthy development and has indicated that social support networks are positively related to the development of resilience (Benard, 1996; Levitt, Guacci-Franco, & Levitt, 1993; Wang, & Kovach, 1996; Wang, et al, 1998; WestEd, 2000). …

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