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Self-Beliefs: Predicting Persistence
Self-Beliefs:
Predicting Persistence of
Families First Participants in Adult Basic Education
Dr. Mary Ziegler
Dr. Sherry Bain
Dr. Sherry Bell
Dr. Steve McCallum
Dr. Donna Brian
Center for Literacy Studies
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
600 Henley St., Suite 312
Knoxville, TN 37996-4135
Executive Summary
Although Families First provides adult education classes for participants without a high school credential, the program has yielded mixed results, in part because many welfare recipients who choose to enroll do not persist long enough to increase their basic skills or earn a General Educational Development (GED) certificate. The purpose of this study was to identify self-beliefs of Families First participants that are capable of predicting persistence in adult basic education. The self-beliefs or dispositional variables that welfare recipients develop and hold to be true may be powerful forces in their success or failure in educational or employment activities. Four dispositional variables are associated with persistence. Attitudes toward school stem from past schooling experiences that helped shape adults’ perceptions including beliefs about the efficacy of attending school. Self-efficacy is the belief about one’s abilities: an estimate of one’s confidence for successfully accomplishing a particular task such as mathematics or reading. Resilience is the ability to manage or cope with adversity or stress in effective ways; resilient people bounce back from adversity. Attribution is the belief about the cause of one’s success or failure. The study addressed the question: To what extent do dispositional factors predict whether welfare recipients who enroll in adult basic education persist in the program?
Study participants were 254 Families First clients who enrolled in Adult Education from ten different counties in Tennessee. Their attendance was tracked for 90 days from the time of their enrollment. All participants were administered a survey that included self-report questions developed to elicit their attitudes toward school, self-efficacy, resilience, and attributions for failure experiences in adult education. The items ultimately comprised the Adult Education Persistence Scale (AEPS). Persistence, the primary focus of the study, was operationalized in two ways: (a) the percentage of attendance (the number of hours in attendance divided by the total number of class hours available) and (b) “high” vs. “low” attendees with those who attended 25% (or less) of class time during a 12-week period referred to as “low attendees” and those who attended 75% (or more) of the time during this period referred to as “high attendees.” Using the appropriate analyses, 30 items were selected for the AEPS. The score means of the high attendee scale were significantly higher than for low attendees. The AEPS Grand Score mean correlated more highly with percentage of attendance than either TABE Math or Reading.
The AEPS Grand Score accounted for 11% of the variance between the high attendees and the low attendees and age accounted for an additional 4%. Using AEPS Grand Scores and age as predictors, 76% of the cases were accurately predicted into two groups: high attendees (the 41 participants who attended 75% or more of the time) and low attendees (the 92 participants who attended 25% or less of class time). Other variables also show differences between the high attendees and the low attendees. The AEPS is a useful tool for adult education professionals who want to provide effective educational services for Families First participants. Examination of participants’ responses on the AEPS can identify areas amenable to intervention.
Specific suggestions for adult education teachers include: (a) provide training to recognize unhealthy attributions (e.g., “Things never go right for me.”) and work toward healthy attributions (e.g., “Things will work out if I keep at it.”); (b) create an adult-oriented environment; (c) make academic tasks meaningful, relevant, and “do-able”; (d) provide opportunities for frequent success experiences; (e) openly address attitudes and attributions; and (f) model and validate “I can” attitudes and statements. Self-beliefs account for only a part of the persistence of a welfare recipient in adult basic education; however, the AEPS is a first step in assessing self-beliefs and the impact they have on persistence for welfare recipients who enrolled in adult basic education classes.
Introduction and Background
More than 44% of adults who receive welfare do not have high school diplomas or General Educational Development (GED) certificates (Fox, Cunningham, Thacker, & Vickers, 2001). Without this basic level of educational preparation, many will have difficulty acquiring jobs and advancing in the workforce. Although Families First, Tennessee’s welfare reform initiative, provides the opportunity for adults to improve their basic skills and earn a GED, the results are mixed. Up to 25% of Families First participants who choose to enroll in adult basic education drop out in less than 30 days, and many of those who remain have irregular attendance and leave before achieving their goals (Ziegler, Ebert, & Henry, 2002).
Yet some welfare recipients persevere despite the obstacles they encounter. One reason for this persistence may be the self-beliefs or dispositional variables that, according to Quiqley (1987), have promising potential to improve retention rates. However, these variables are underrepresented in the literature (Cross, 1981). Comings, Parrella, and Soricone (1999) identified self-beliefs or dispositional variables in their study of “persisters” in adult basic education programs in Massachusetts and concluded that “researchers must help to develop both better measures of and tools for measuring persistence” (p. 73). The goal of this study was to assess dispositional variables and determine the relative power that these variables have to predict the persistence of Families First participants who enroll in adult basic education. For this study, dispositional variables are defined as attitudes toward school, self-efficacy, resilience, and attributions. Each dispositional variable will be discussed in the following sections.
Attitudes Toward School
Attitudes toward school stem from past schooling experiences that influenced students’ perceptions about the efficacy of attending school, the likelihood that attending school will increase one’s academic skills, the ability of the teacher to provide effective instruction, and the potential return of the investment of time in school. Ziegahn (1992) and Quigley (1997) noted that most adults who have low literacy skills value education and learning, but many resist schooling because of the failure they experienced in the past. Numerous additional researchers assert that past negative school experiences are the primary de-motivating influence for their lack of participation in adult basic education (Beder, 1990; Malicky & Norman, 1994; Quigley, 1997, 1993; Van Tilberg & DuBois, 1989; Velazquez, 1996; Wikelund, Reder, & Hart-Landsberg, 1992). Beder (1990, 1991) and Quigley (1997, 2000) argue that prior school experience plays an important role in an adult’s decision not to persist. Offering empirical support for this view, Baldwin (1991) interviewed more than 7,000 GED graduates who identified the main reason they left school from a list of 44 items. A factor analysis identified seven categories, three related to past school experiences. Hayes (1988) used the Deterrents to Participation Scale to survey 160 adults currently enrolled in basic education classes about their past reasons for nonparticipation. She found five factors, one of which was “negative attitude toward classes.” Finally, Beder (1989) questioned 175 Iowa residents about their failure to attend adult basic education, finding dislike of school as one of four main reasons they did not participate.
In contrast, other researchers have found that not all individuals who dropped out disliked school. From interviews with 45 adult basic education students drawn from a larger sample, Courtney, Jha, and Babchuk (1994) hypothesized that adults interpret their initial experience of entering an adult basic education class as either “the chance to do it over…to redeem themselves,” or an experience that reminds them “of what they disliked about school” (p. 192). Other studies found that prior school experiences may play only a minor role in an adult’s decision to persist in adult basic education (Comings, Parrella, & Soricone, 1999; Long, 2001).
The literature provides no clear definition of what comprises past negative school experiences because each study describes this phenomenon in a different way. Although past school experiences may have significant consequences for participation and engagement in adult basic education, the fragmentations and contradictions found in the literature suggest the need for further research.
Self-Efficacy
As a psychological construct, self-efficacy was first described by Bandura (1977, 1978, 1986), who proposed that a person’s expectations of mastery or success influence both his or her decision to perform a difficult task as well as the amount of effort and persistence assigned to the task. Simply put, self-efficacy is a person’s belief about how effective he or she will be in performing a given task. In general, high self-efficacy has been found to increase engagement in a given task, increase the likelihood of performing the task successfully, and, in turn, further increase self-efficacy. Low self-efficacy is associated with task-avoidance, poor performance, and steadily decreasing self-efficacy over time. Applied to the domain of adult literacy, two individuals at the same reading level will be differentially motivated to improve their reading skills, based on their respective levels of self-efficacy. Bandura proposed that four types of experiences can influence self-efficacy: prior experiences with similar tasks, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and level of anxiety. Prior experience may be difficult to change but the remaining three variables may be amenable to training (see Gist & Mitchell, 1992).
The relationship between self-efficacy and academic success or persistence has been reviewed by Gorrell (1990) and McMillan, Simonetta, and Singh (1994). Others have explored the relationship between weight reduction and self-efficacy (Chambliss & Murray, 1979), children’s literacy and self-efficacy (Schunk, 1994), and diving performance and self-efficacy (Feltz, 1982).
Generic instruments have been developed to measure self-efficacy across many types of tasks. For example, the Self-Efficacy Scale developed by Sherer, Maddux, Mercandante, Prentice-Dunn, Jacobs, and Rogers (1982) was designed to investigate the relationship between self-efficacy and success in vocational, educational, and military careers. However, to develop the instrument, the authors limited their participants to military veterans attending an inpatient alcoholism treatment unit, suggesting problems of generalization to unlike groups.
To improve applicability to specific groups, Huang, Lloyd, and Mikulecky (1999) suggested developing self-efficacy instruments tied to a target group of individuals approaching a specific task, e.g., in their case, adults learning English as a second language (ESL). Scales designed for generic purposes, across groups of people and across tasks, may be too broad to measure self-efficacy for a specific task. Huang and colleagues, using a custom-designed instrument, were able to show a strong relationship between self-efficacy scores on several factors and ESL students’ general class placement. Applied to welfare recipients in adult basic education programs, self efficacy as a predictor of persistence or success has not been explored. Based upon current literature, an instrument pursuing this relationship should be custom-designed to suit the particular tasks that the population of interest will face.
Resilience
Resilience is the ability to manage or cope with adversity or stress in effective ways; resilient people bounce back from adversity. The level of resiliency can be viewed as a function of risk factors intersecting with protective factors. Risk factors result from stressful life events (such as abuse, losing a job, or being the victim of a crime). Protective factors might include skills, personality factors, and environmental supports. Resilience has only recently been discussed in the psychology of coping literature (O’Neal, 1999). In the developmental literature, resilience has been described as “the ability to use internal and external resources successfully to resolve stage-salient developmental issues” (Egeland, Carlson & Sroufe, 1993, p. 518).
More frequently, investigations on the subject of hardiness have appeared in psychological literature. Hardiness, in essence the same as resilience (see O’Neal, 1999), was first investigated by Kobasa and Maddi (e.g., Kobasa, 1979; Maddi & Kobasa, 1981). Described by Maddi and Khoshaba (1994), hardiness is a “sense of self-in-world that emphasizes commitment, control, and challenge” (p. 272). The three elements, commitment, control, and challenge, were later modified in name and definition by Nowack (1989), who defined (a) involvement [renaming commitment] as a “commitment…to one’s work, family, self, hobbies;” (b) challenge, as “attitudes around viewing life changes as challenges, as opposed to threats;” and (c) control, as “beliefs that one has a sense of control over significant outcomes in life”
(p. 150).
The relationship between hardiness and mental health has been explored in several studies (e.g., Kobasa, 1979; Kobasa, Maddi & Courington, 1981). The relationship between hardiness and physical health has been similarly explored (e.g., Nowack 1989). In addition, a study of the construct validity of an instrument, The Revised Hardiness Scale (Brookings & Bolton, 1997) found significant relationships between hardiness and happiness, and between hardiness and low anxiety.
Measures of resilience or hardiness have been used to evaluate those at high risk for failure (e.g., educational failure), those who are chronically exposed to high levels of stress (e.g., those living below the poverty level), and those vulnerable to various stress-related disorders (e.g., cardiovascular disease). For example, Cappella and Weinstein (2001) investigated predictors of resilience in high school students at risk for academic failure. The authors identified characteristics of low-achieving students who were able to overcome significant barriers in order to meet the academic demands of high school.
Like self-efficacy, the construct of resilience has not been studied among welfare recipients in adult education programs. Dispositional factors that protect an individual from continued stress may conceivably add to persistence in the face of difficulties in learning basic literacy skills.
Attributions
Attributions are beliefs about the causes of one’s success or failure; motivation is influenced by the reasons people give (attributions) for success and failure. People may attribute their success or failure to their ability, effort, the context of the situation (including task difficulty), or luck. Applied to adult basic education, participants who believe they achieve success because of effort will be more likely to persist during difficult times.
The attributions or explanations individuals make for events in their lives are related to their adjustment and achievement. A strong body of research indicates that higher achieving and better adjusted persons attribute their successes to internal causes and failures to external causes while lower achieving and more poorly adjusted students attribute their failures to internal causes and successes to external causes (e.g., Bell, 1990; Bell & McCallum, 1995; Rotter, 1975; Seligman, 1991; Weiner, 1979). The tendency to attribute one’s success to internal causes and one’s failures to external causes (“self-serving” bias) is well-documented (see Kinderman & Bentall, 2000; Marsh, 1984; Weiner, 1979) and is considered “healthy” in that it contributes to maintenance of high self-esteem. However, an extreme tendency to attribute successes to internal causes and failure to external causes is related to paranoid thinking and behavior (Kinderman & Bentall, 2000). The opposite pattern of attributing success to external causes and failure to internal causes is related to depression (Bell, McCallum & Doucette, 2002; Kinderman & Bentall; 2000; Seligman, 1991).