CASE+STUDY+A


 * CASE A: What should Sherry do to help Joe?**

Type your names here: Joe, Nick, Richard, Ken, Sarah

Our student, Joe is a gangly, awkward sixth grader doing poorly in school. To his teacher he appears to be socially isolated with few friends. In class, he often pays little attention to what is going on and appears emotionally and intellectually detached. Although his ability tests are just slightly below normal his performance is much lower. Educators at his school are concerned that Joe suffers from low self-esteem, poor motivation and his own view of his intelligence. They are also concerned that Joe comes from a disadvantaged background that has been unable to help him to succeed in school. Joe’s teacher is hoping she can help him and is concerned about his motivation. Motivation is, in short, a way to explain why people behave the way they do. A motivated person tends to be sustained, directed and energized. Motivation is a direct behavior towards a certain goal. High levels of motivation lead to improved performance. Joe currently lacks any sort of motivation. He is not doing very well in school and goes home to a life that does not support a continuing education. As his math teacher, I am trying my best to help motivate Joe. He lacks intrinsic motivation, which is the motivation to take part in an activity for its own sake. Participation in and of itself is the reward. The tasks one does are usually enjoyable. Joe does not have the motivation to take part in school for its own sake - education. He does not participate in his studies and is therefore failing. In other words, he does not work hard at his schoolwork for the reward of passing. He does not enjoy school and therefore completely school related tasks are not enjoyable for him. In my efforts to motivate Joe, I have adopted the behavioral perspective. This perspective emphasizes external punishments and rewards. Instead of punishments, I am utilizing rewards. I am using incentives, which is positive stimuli that can motivate a student to behave. I began by praising Joe’s correct answers and ignoring his wrong answers. Soon I saw that he started answering questions in class, voluntarily and that his math scores began to slowly improve. In this situation, I seemed to have identified the problem and tried to help Joe. By rewarding Joe’s correct answers he may become more motivated to try in class and therefore increase his overall learning. Others at the school have focused on Joe’s on view of his intelligence. The idea of intelligence has many definitions and theories associated with it. It can be described with the classical thinking of Spearman and his “two-factor theory of intelligence” or in a more modern context with Gardner and Sternberg. However, the most important view of intelligence is the one Joe holds himself. Although his best subject is Math, he is still underperforming in the subject. When asked if he can improve, he claims that he is trying his best and there is nothing else he can do. Joe’s has an “entity view of ability,” or a “belief that ability is stable and uncontrollable” (Bohlin, Durwin, Reese-Weber, p. 300). Students that hold this view of intelligence tend to avoid challenging tasks and failed tasks often end with the student in the “Why bother?” mindset (Dweck, 1999). Joe believes that his best is not good enough and that there is nothing he can do about it. Another factor contributing to Joe’s unproductive view of intelligence is his socioeconomic status (SES). Joe comes from a poor family with one working parent who makes just enough money to get by. Children from lower SES tend to have “fewer educational resources, poorer nutrition, poorer healthcare, and strained parent-child relationships” (Bohlin, et al. p. 403). All of these forces are working against Joe and make it difficult for him to succeed and fit in at school. However, he has internalized all of these external problems in his environment and believes that he is responsible for his failures. While Sherry’s method of “praise and ignore” has shown to help slightly, she must continue to work with Joe as he struggles to succeed in her classroom. She must work to instill a positive attitude about education in Joe and transform his “entity” view of intelligence to a more positive “incremental view.” Students who acknowledge intelligence as being incremental view their abilities as improvable and controllable (Bohlin, et al. p. 300). They tend to work harder, learn from their failures, and see mistakes as a part of learning (Dweck, 1999). Sherry’s praise has begun to improve Joe for the better, but there is much more work to be done. Sherry can also follow Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI) and change her teaching methods to help Joe. The MI theory suggests that students have eight intelligences and their abilities vary in each (Bohlin, et al., p. 403). Joe and the other students in the class have diverse strengths and weaknesses and Sherry can help meet their needs by tailoring her lessons to accommodate students that have many different learning styles. Teaching in this manner will allow fewer topics to be covered, but they will be covered in more depth and more students will be successful (Bohlin, et al., p. 406). Another educator has looked at Joe’s family situation and finds reason to be concerned with how this affects his learning at school. Sherry had Joe evaluated by the appropriate counselors to test his abilities. They determined that Joe’s abilities were sufficient to at least achieve average grades, yet Joe’s grades were below average. Joe’s low grades could be attributed to constraints in his home environment and not his intelligence. Building on this case the reader come to find out Joe’ father is a night watchman who can barely makes ends meet for his family and his mother is obese and has a variety of illnesses that prevent her from doing housework. To add to the complexity in Joe’s life, he also has five other siblings, two of whom are mentally handicapped. This situation Joe has found himself in allows him to make the moral decision to help care for his brothers, sisters, and mother at the expense of performing sub par at school. Joe’s moral reasoning may actually tie into Eisenberg’s Theory of prosocial moral reasoning (Bohlin, et al., p. 80). Reason suggests Joe focuses on the needs of his family before his own self-interest including his own education. This is characteristic of Eisenberg’s second level of prosocial thinking known as needs orientation (Bohlin, et al., p. 80). Joe also has the ability to recognize important necessities in maintaining a family. He finds math as a tool to determine his paycheck and perhaps budget his earnings wisely. He also identifies the importance of hunting for food if he lived in the age of Pilgrims. All of these values may relate back to Joe’s moral reasoning to help his family before helping himself academically. Still others who have viewed this case see issues of self-worth and self-efficacy as central to Joe’s situation. Joe would be classified as a “failure accepting” type of student that Covington and Mueller (2001) described (Bohlin, et al. p., 302). Joe neither approaches success nor avoids failure. He just gives up the struggle and accepts he can’t do it. He sees his failure as beyond his control. Thus his self-efficacy is very low. In Bandura’s terms (Bohlin, et al. p 180) self-efficacy develops form four sources: 1. Past performance: Individual success in a specific domain in the past is likely to have high self-efficacy for that task. Unfortunately Joe just doesn’t see any success. 2. Modeling: When individuals see others similar to themselves having success they are also likely to believe they too can be successful. But Joe doesn’t seem to see anyone like himself. Other students have problems too but he doesn’t socialize so he isn’t aware of that. 3. Verbal persuasion: Students told they can succeed are more likely to be able to. Conversely, students told they are unlikely to succeed are likely to develop low self-esteem. 4. Physiological states: Physical strength and health can have positive effects on self-efficacy. Joe is just at that very awkward stage of growth when he doesn’t seem to feel comfortable in his own body. Cultural differences may also influence the development of self-efficacy. Joe doesn’t appear to see any authority figures that represent him. His self-efficacy influences his behavior too as he chooses only to try to get by. He lacks persistent effort when he doesn’t know something right away and his achievement shows it. His efficacy expectation is low. To help Joe, we should avoid making explicit comparisons of ability because he is going to feel he is dumb. We need to put him with students who are doing better but do not necessarily have any more ability than he does. We don’t want to send the message that he can only be in the dumb group. As teachers, we all need to believe and convey our belief in him. Joe also needs the opportunity to practice low road transfer to achieve automaticity in some of his math study so that he can receive specific praise for the task (Bohlin, et al. p. 235). A good meaningful learning project for Joe would involve a group project concerning a math problem about working for an hourly wage. With an appropriate peer group they could be asked to calculate a math problem to figure how much overtime a person would have to work to buy something they wanted or needed. Let’s let them tell us what they want to buy. Joe might just think of his family rather than something for himself! Then we could ask them to recalculate the problem with a better paying job. We would like Joe to see this as more relevant and perhaps connect the higher paying job with a better education. Together we can help Joe on his way to a more fulfilling school experience.