Low Self Esteem in American Youth – Why Teacher Support is Crucial?
For children all over the United States and beyond the long summer holidays are over and a new school year, with all the trials and tribulations it can bring, is well underway. A cross cultural study that included both American and Chinese middle school children has been published that demonstrates the validity of a commonly held belief; if children feel well supported by their teachers and their peers they are likely to do far better in school and have a higher overall sense of self esteem.
The study set out to examine both the differences and the commonalities between a set of middle school children, 1,500 of them, in urban schools in China and the US.
They focused on asking children about three main issues; teacher support, student support, and how much autonomy they felt they had within the classroom setting. They then analyzed the responses and looked for ties to the students overall grades and their apparent self esteem, as well as possible signs of depression.
The study concluded that it was the Chinese students who expressed a greater sense of teacher support, as well as from their peers and felt that they did indeed have a good deal of opportunity for autonomy in the classroom. However in both the Chinese and the American middle schools students those who had expressed that they did feel that they had good support from instructors demonstrated both a higher sense of self worth and better grades. Conversely, those who felt alienated from their fellow students displayed signs of depression.
Somewhat surprisingly increased opportunities for autonomy in the classroom for both sets of students actually translated into a lower grade point average researchers say.
In many urban areas of America finding good teachers has become a difficult task for school board administrators. In New York City for instance the school board offers attractive bonuses and tuition and living expense reimbursement to new young teachers who are willing to work in some of the more difficult inner city schools, which still carry a reputation for being violent and dangerous places to teach. This study only serves to underscore just how important a teacher’s influence on a child really is.
The study was conducted by multiple teams of researchers working in collaboration with each other. They came from Southeast University (in Nanjing, China), New York University, Harvard University, and the University of Western Ontario, as well as from the Educational Testing Service and the Nanjing Brain Hospital.The study was published in full in the September/October 2009 edition of the journal Child Development.
September 18th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Look closely at the three factors that were included in this study: teacher support, student support, and autonomy in the classroom. The study is invalid, and obviously run by a pack of educational administrators.
In their study, these people intentionally ignore parental support. They do it intentionally because educational administrators do not WANT parents to “interfere” in what they see as their own fiefdom. I encourage one and all to ignore this study. By the way, I am a teacher.