Constructing Educational Achievement

A sociocultural perspective

Sivanes Phillipson, Kelly Ku, Shane Phillipson, Sivanes Phillipson, Kelly Y.L Ku, Shane N Phillipson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136764233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

International interest focuses on why pupils from East-Asia tend to outperform pupils from the West and scholars have proposed a number of possible explanations to account for these international trends. Using Vygotsky's theory (1978) as a conceptual framework to "construct" school achievement, this book puts forward culturally relevant context for understanding developmental aspects of children's school achievement and their implication to classroom practice and education progress. Converging the two important lines of inquiry – the child factor and the sociocultural factor – this book showcases evidence-based scholarly works from across the globe that shed light on causes of academic achievement in different contexts.

The book brings together eminent scholars from early childhood, primary education, secondary and vocational education who expertly capture the vitality of development and processes of specific child factors and their interaction with their environment that explain their school achievement. Foregrounded in the five planes of cultural historical, institutional, social, personal and mental, the research explain how children think, learn and form the will to perform amidst the changing social and family environment, and challenging school and educational environment.

Part 1

Introduction

1 Constructing educational achievement within a sociocultural framework of planes

Sivanes Phillipson and Peter D. Renshaw

Introduction

The results from international achievement tests such as TIMSS, PISA and PIRLS continue to fascinate and preoccupy researchers, policy makers, and practitioners. As the results are published and examined, they generate significant debate on what types of schools, teaching practices, curriculum frameworks, sociocultural values, and conditions contribute to children’s academic achievement. Of particular interest to researchers is how to explain the achievement of East Asian students, who continue to outperform their counterparts in North America, the UK, Australia, and other Western nations. Research has suggested that individual differences in academic achievement are determined by many interacting factors, including distinctive sociocultural experiences and values, personal characteristics of students, such as cognitive and motivational capabilities, and systemic differences in schooling structures, curriculum, and pedagogy.

Until the 1990s, when international testing programs became widespread and influential, Western educational researchers and practitioners were prone to criticize the approaches to teaching and learning adopted in Asian countries for their assumed deployment of rote and surface approaches (Biggs, 1994). Stevenson (Chen & Stevenson, 1995; Stevenson et al., 1990) and other researchers (Biggs, 1994; Hess & Azuma, 1991; Renshaw & Volet, 1995; Watkins & Biggs, 1996, 2001) critiqued these negative assumptions and began to document the distinctive and effective ways that Asian teachers and students engage in teaching and learning at school and university (Renshaw & Power, 2003). Such research has shown that students’ academic achievement is related to a number of interacting factors, including the ways that schools are structured, how teaching is conducted, the support students receive from home and the surrounding society, and motivational and cognitive resources the students invest in their own learning and development.

Recent studies comparing the achievement of students from different national and ethnic groups within a country (e.g., Dandy & Nettelbeck, 2002; Phillipson, 2009) have highlighted the complexity of interacting factors required to account for different learning outcomes within each sociocultural situation. Accordingly, it is now understood that, amongst many factors, children need to deploy both will and skill to do well in school (Pintrich & Schunk, 2002). Studies have suggested that within the concepts of will and skill is the interplay of personal and social factors, such as the child’s own capabilities, the supportive people who scaffold their learning and development, and their access to mediating tools and artifacts that contribute to academic achievement (Rogoff, 1984; Salili, Chiu, & Hong, 2001). Family and peers, in particular, are closer in proximity within this circle of social and cultural environment. Teachers and schools are also seen to be within this circle of children’s school achievement (Stevenson & Stigler, 1992).

A sociocultural paradigm

To theorize these interacting factors at the personal and social planes, we draw upon Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory. In a 1930 introduction to a monograph on development, Vygotsky and Luria (cited in Wertsch, 1985) suggested that:

In child development, along with the processes of organic growth and maturation, a second line of development is clearly distinguished – the cultural growth of behavior. It is based on the mastery of devices and means of cultural behavior and thinking.

(p. 23)

Vygotksy (1960, p. 118) proposed that “it is not nature, but society that above all else must be considered to be the determining factor in human behavior”. Vygotsky (1978, p. 57) viewed children’s cognitive development as existing on two planes: the social or between the people plane, and the personal or inside the child plane; and he proposed that these planes interact reciprocally across time. This classic distinction between the interpersonal plane and the intrapersonal plane has been extended and enriched by contemporary researchers, such as Rogoff (1995), who proposed three planes for analyzing the ways in which children learn, namely, the personal, the interpersonal, and the community plane. These are inseparable, mutually constituting planes but each plane can become the focus of separate analysis in particular studies if the whole system of interacting planes is not ignored. This approach moves beyond analytical schemes that separate the individual and the environment.

We build upon Rogoff’s proposal by distinguishing five planes of analysis that might be foregrounded in different research studies in order to understand children’s achievement and learning in educational contexts. These are the (i) cultural–historical plane, (ii) institutional plane, (iii) social plane, (iv) personal plane, and (v) mental plane.

Contributions in this book could be viewed from each of these planes and an overlap of the spaces in the planes. We provide an overview of each plane and how chapters in this book might place themselves under each plane. It is important to note though that the planes, whilst distinctive, remain intertwined and dynamic in nature; hence our placement of the chapters highlights the predominant analytical focus but does not imply that each plane can be considered isolated and independent of the others.

Cultural-historical plane

Presented first in this book is the cultural–historical plane. We begin with this plane because, as Vadeboncoeur shows in her chapter (Chapter 2) entitled “Framing achievement when learning is unified”, we view educational achievement as deriving from a holistic process in the cultural-historical plane. In this plane, cultural-historical activity and change, where historic events such as mass migration within a nation or emigration across nations, create interactions between people of similar and different languages and cultures. Vadeboncoeur explores the Vygotskian notion of word meaning and emotional experience to demonstrate the importance of interactions between people and historical events as providing mediating tools in learning.

The historical events arise from changes in the economy, in technology, and in population densities that challenge people from different places to live, learn, and work together. In this book, Wu (Chapter 3) brings us back to historical events in China, and how societal changes impact upon the Chinese family’s capacity to empower their child’s personal agency and their ability to achieve in their cultural setting. The cultural-historical plane also draws attention to the closeness and distance of differences and similarities between people over time. Taking this as the basis, Wu highlights the differences and similarities of Chinese families’ social capital from the 1980s to the current day, to show the changes over time and how those changes impact on children’s capacity to achieve.

Similarly, Keegan, Brown, and Hattie (Chapter 4) capture how historical events and culturally specific needs mandate culturally responsive and sensitive standardized assessment to cater for Māori children’s educational achievement. They present a convincing argument regarding how a pluralist approach rather than an assimilationist practice of evaluating achievement could be effectively managed to fulfill the needs of different cultural groups with their own specific historical and cultural background within a multi-cultural setting. This approach, hence, has to take into account the different institutional demands in relation to the cultural needs.

Institutional plane

The second plane is the institutional plane. Educational tasks and processes are nested within institutions that have been designed, redesigned, adapted, and transformed over time. The institutional plane of analysis could include, for example, the analysis of schools and universities attended by students, as well as their homes and family arrangements, and the interaction and synchrony between these different institutional contexts. In such analysis, a researcher attempts to document the tools, interactive settings, speech genres, and other mediational means that are provided to students within these institutions and how such tools and mediational means function across settings.

Renshaw’s chapter (Chapter 5) on classroom chronotopes foregrounds how this institutional plane interacts with the cultural-historical plane. His description of contrasting classroom chronotopes from different periods of the twentieth century shows what counts as effective learning and how achievement has changed across time. Renshaw proposes a relational learning time and space as opposed to the current testing orientation that narrows the objectives of education in current times.

Within this framework of relational learning, Draper (Chapter 6) focuses on the formation of teacher self-efficacy in the context of teaching and learning. She stresses the importance of teachers, as the core of any teaching institution, having a belief in their own competence because teachers’ internalized competence impacts upon their ability to support learners. The role that teachers play in school affects learning in other institutions, such as the home. Where there is synchrony and compatibility across institutions, an apparent seamless space for learning can be created across contexts.

Social plane

Deriving from the cultural-historical and institutional plane is the social plane, which is an interactive space, created through communication (verbal, non-verbal; virtual or face to face) between two or more people. This is typically regarded as Vygotsky’s interpersonal plane. In Chapter 7, Sivanes Phillipson provides an example of the communication of parental expectations as mediation for their children’s educational achievement. Through a meta-analysis of past research on parental expectations and their impact on their children’s achievement, Phillipson demonstrates how the parental expectations communicated to children within the family affect children’s achievement at school. In her chapter on children’s play and learning motives (Chapter 8), Fleer shows us how assisting a child in his homework can be integrated within a family’s everyday social events. Such a practice provides a platform for scaffolded tasks where dialogic speech is used to assist children to develop more independence in functions such as planning, convincing, deciding, judging, and choosing. In Fleer’s study, the child was able to complete his homework tasks successfully and this provided further confidence in his learning capacity.

Four other chapters provide further examples of practices within the social plane, where structured dialogue is used to engage students in learning for specific outcomes. McCaslin and Vega (Chapter 9) draw upon their research on primary school students’ co-regulation of learning in dynamic group work situations. They reveal how verbal dialogues and personal verbalization enable individual learning and coping within group dynamics. Sivan and Chan (Chapter 10) provide a contrasting cultural view by describing the Hong Kong classroom, where cooperative teacher-student interactions result in better learning outcomes for students, not only in their cognitive capacities but also in relation to heightened affective and moral values that facilitate holistic student development.

In a similar vein, Hay, Callingham, and Wright (Chapter 11) showcase their study on mature students of Asian backgrounds learning vocational subjects using English as a medium of instruction. Teachers engaged students in four levels of structured dialogues and interaction to facilitate their movement from lower order to higher order understanding of culturally challenging concepts. Teachers’ own reflections and student–teacher interaction helped both teacher and students to improve upon their engagement in learning the subject matter whilst coping with language and cultural differences.

In Chapter 12, Baucal argues that the dynamic structure of learning within the zone of proximal development (ZPD) could be differentiated on a social and personal level. He characterizes the ZPD as joint collaboration necessarily followed by individual effort to construct knowledge. Baucal concludes that the individual construction of knowledge transcends that of the social paradigm. This conclusion shows that the nature of children’s learning is socially constructed and yet individually culminated as a “uniquely cultural form of adaptation which involve[s] both an overlay on and a reorganization of more basic psychological functions” (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 107).

Personal plane

Embedded within the social plane is the personal plane, which involves a shift in focus to an individual engaged in a solo activity with the aid of cultural tools and mediational means. An observer can see the individual doing a cultural activity (reading, problem solving, planning, listening, or watching media) and the individua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Cultural–historical plane
• Part 3 Institutional plane
• Part 4 Social plane
• Part 5 Personal plane
• Part 6 Mental plane
• Part 7 Conclusion
• Index