An individual's behavior is shaped profoundly by the environments in which they have been exposed and grown up. The first 18 years of someone's life are shaped largely by school, which is a melting pot of different cultures, philosophies, approaches to life, and influences by adult role models, including the classroom teachers. These teachers often use language towards their students that reinforces negative behaviors relating to the students' motivation and beliefs about their own capabilities, and it all comes down to passively reinforced stereotypes.
Self-Efficacy
Self-efficacy, an individual's belief in their own capabilities, is most shaped by a student's previous experiences with success & failure and reinforcement given by role-model figures. When the teacher offers their support and encouragement to their students, it encourages them to foster a belief in themselves that they can accomplish anything. As long as the teacher keeps encouraging and there is success to back it up, a student's self-efficacy is shaped positively. Conversely, when given complex problems that students are not properly equipped to handle, it reflects poorly on their self-efficacy. Stereotypes can affect a student's self-efficacy by imposing a belief upon students that they are unable to accomplish a task because of something inherent to who they are. For example, if a student has grown up performing poorly on math tests, she may have been told, at one point or another, that math just simply is not her thing because she is a girl, and girls are bad at math. While obviously not true, this gives the student the stable & uncontrollable mindset that she is not equipped with the capabilities to accomplish what she needs to.
Attribution Theory
Factors influencing locus:
Internal: When a student performs poorly in class, they often internally attribute this to a lower intelligence compared to their peers. This aspect of locus can be easily shaped by the classroom teacher through comments and approaches in class. Every behavior and interaction that the teacher displays conveys a message to their students, either positively or negatively. If a student is consistently slacking off in class, the teacher may call them out for being too lazy, giving the student the notion that they are inherently lazy, which sticks in their minds and shapes their behavior for years to come.
External: External factors may be reinforced by role models through stereotypes without conscious effort. For example, to say that one simply could not have done well after failing a test by way of the test being unreasonably difficult attributes the student's failure to an external factor, avoiding guilt and responsibility.
Factors influencing stability:
Stable: A high level of consistency, when recognized by the teacher, reinforces behaviors in the students and leads to stability of those behaviors.
Unstable: Attributions that are unstable but within the student's control are easily shaped by the teacher's influence. Any negative attributions relating to reinforced stereotypes in a student's head usually change with instability. Since the stereotype is reinforced for so long, it becomes a stable factor in the student's life. But when the student makes an effort to "break the mold," they often begin to shake the foundation that the stereotype sits upon and begin to change the paradigm.
Factors influencing controllability:
Controllable: Controllability is inherently linked to the amount of effort put in by the student, where a high amount of effort given to a task and the result of such effort may often also be attributed to natural, innate ability by the teacher.
Uncontrollable: This is often where stereotypes come into play, reinforced within the classroom. If a student of African-American descent does poorly on a math test, the teacher may tell them that they simply "do not test well," unknowingly reinforcing the stereotype that a group of people generally achieves at a lower level, and putting this stereotype into their head. This can have long-term impacts on the student, making it difficult to get over this mental obstacle placed onto them by someone in a position of authority, and affecting them for years to come as it branches out into all aspects of life.
Mindset Theory
When teachers foster a classroom where students are encouraged to grow above all else, it gives the students a mindset geared towards such. In this environment, students believe in themselves and their abilities because they have been shown, through smaller, cumulative goals over time, that they can achieve anything if they simply put their mind towards it and put in the effort to grow. However, the difficulty of the goals can sometimes mean that students may begin to doubt themselves if they do not achieve every goal to 100% completion or perfection, so teachers need to set complex but achievable goals that students work towards that reward effort and growth over perfection.
Learned Helplessness
When given impossible tasks over and over again and informed that they have the know-how to succeed, students begin to believe that no matter what they do, their failure is out of their hands. Over repeated and continuous instances of this, students are conditioned to think that they cannot succeed, no matter what. Even when they are presented with tasks that are well within their reach, the students still believe that they are incapable because that is all they are familiar with. Going back to the example with the student who underperforms on math exams, depending on how much that student has been told that she cannot do as well as her male colleagues, she may develop a mindset that she might as well not even try, because she will underperform no matter what. This leads to learned helplessness over repeated instances of being told that her capabilities are insufficient regardless.
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