Cultural Expression and Black Students' Attitudes Toward High Achievers

The authors of the present study have extended research by D. Marryshow that investigated African American students' attitudes toward 4 high achievers who differed in their approach to high achievement. D. Marryshow (1992) assessed students' social attitudes and perceptions of 4 high achievers with culturally distinct achievement orientations. In the present research, the authors assessed students' academic attitudes and perceptions of the same 4 high achievers. In addition, the present study includes Black children's predictions of their parents' and peers' attitudes toward these high achieving students. The results generally supported the authors' hypothesis that African American children would report a preference for students who achieve via attitudes and behaviors congruent with African American cultural values. The children also predicted that their parents and their Black peers would prefer these same African American culturally oriented high achievers. The findings suggest that Black children who prefer African American cultural modes of achievement may find themselves at odds with classroom demands geared toward learning in the mainstream cultural mode and thus may be at increased risk of academic failure.

Examining Culturally Structured Learning Environments With Different Types of Music-Linked Movement Opportunity

This study describes two experiments that extended earlier work on the Afrocultural theme Movement Expression. The impact of various learning conditions characterized by different types of music-linked movement on story recall performance was examined. African American children were randomly assigned to a learning condition, presented a story, and tested on story recall. In Experiment 1 (N = 48), the authors confirmed the basic finding of Boykin and colleagues that learning conditions with polyrhythmic-percussive music type and high movement opportunity enhanced story recall better than other types of music-linked movement. In Experiment 2 (N = 128), the authors compared story recall in different music-linked movement conditions across grade levels and established improvement only for fourth graders in the learning condition with polyrhythmic-percussive music and high movement. Both fourth and sixth graders' lowest performance was in the condition devoid of any music or movement. Finally, a positive relationship was observed between performance and children's mood state in each learning condition. Movement Expression as a powerful tool for classroom learning for African American children is discussed.

Communal versus individual learning of a math-estimation task: African American children and the culture of learning contexts

The authors compared the performance of 78 African American 5th-grade students who studied a math-estimation task in one of two learning contexts. Learning contexts differed in the degree to which they afforded the expression of communalism. ANCOVA confirmed that posttest performance was best for students who studied in the high communal-learning context. The findings support A. W. Boykin's (1994) contention that the cultural context of learning can be a critical mediator of children's performance.

The early education of socioeconomically disadvantaged children

This chapter reviews selected research on the education of low-socioeconomic status (SES) children from birth through the first years of elementary school. Themes include the importance of early academic skills and interest to later achievement; the benefits of integrating knowledge from research on mental health and other areas; the need to utilize and build children's strengths as well as address their weaknesses; and a call to connect research to practice and policy. Relevant research on race and culture is reviewed because ethnic minority low-SES children are at great risk of poverty. Gender is discussed because low-SES boys have poorer general achievement than girls, while very few low-SES girls pursue careers in math- and science-related fields.