Education in the changing society: The negative effect of pessimistic future outlooks on optimism about personal future and academic aspirations

• In Event: Critical perspectives on large-scale assessments: Methodological innovations, validity, and societal implications

Proposal

Digitalisation is but one of the many rapid transitions unfolding in the societies worldwide and affecting people's lives and daily activities, including education. Growing uncertainty about the future – including economic and labour-market instability, political polarization, shrinking civic liberties, climate change, and wars, to name a few – frames the context in which education is unfolding today. Moreover, these issues reveal and reinforce various divides that must be addressed if education should serve as the “great equalizer” and offer support to students’ learning and development.

In terms of psychological development, students are not only expected to learn the core content of the curriculum/syllabuses but also acquire skills and develop competencies that will enable them to be successful in the ever-changing world. Concurrently, throughout adolescence and emerging adulthood, they strive to complete various developmental tasks such as completing education, establishing a career, forming academic and occupational identities, and gaining financial independence. All the while, young people today report being increasingly worried about their personal future (e.g., employment and housing prospects) and the future of society at large (e.g., wars, poverty, climate anxiety). These worries are linked with lower well-being but can also contribute to delays in completing the developmental tasks and reaching the (subjective) markers of adulthood. Moreover, bleak outlooks might be demotivating for students, lowering their academic aspirations, which can have detrimental effects for their future outcomes. In our paper, we will thus explore how students’ perceptions of threats to the global future and worries/optimism about personal future are linked to their academic aspirations.

We used Slovenian data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2022, internationally coordinated by IEA and ACER. The sample comprises 3,466 eighth-graders who were 13.9 years old on average. We analysed a combination of indices/scales available in the dataset and students’ reports about the perception of 11 global threats (e.g., pollution, violent conflict, poverty, overpopulation) from International and European student questionnaires. Specifically, we used the scales of students' expectations for their individual future (5 items, e.g., I will find a steady job), positive (6 items, e.g., There will be peace across Europe) and negative expectations for European future (7 items, e.g., There will be a rise in poverty and unemployment in Europe), and expected educational attainment (four categories corresponding to ISCED levels). We hypothesised that greater worries (negative outlook) about the societal outcomes will be linked with lower optimism about the personal future (stable employment, financial independence, opportunity to travel for leisure), and this, in turn, would lead to worse expected educational outcomes (student-expected highest level of education completed).

The results show that students with more negative outlook for the European future were more optimistic about their individual future (ρ = .13, p < .001) but had slightly lower expectations about their educational attainment (ρ = –.07, p < .001). On the other hand, positive outlook was not significantly related to academic aspirations (ρ = –.01, p < .530), but was linked with more optimistic views about student's own future (ρ = .26, p < .001). We also observed significant correlations of academic aspirations and personal optimism with the perception of threats to the global future – students with higher aspirations and more optimism about their future perceived all the surveyed issues as bigger threats (ρs between .04 and .19, ps < .001). The fact that optimism and high aspirations are linked with less negative perceptions of future threats can at least partly be explained by the role of confounding variables. For example, additional analyses show that students who were more optimistic (ρ = .06, p < .001), worried less about the European future (ρ = –.16, p < .001), and had higher educational aspirations (ρ = .42, p < .001) were also exhibiting higher levels on civic knowledge scale.

Because academic aspirations and optimism might be related to both educational outcomes and indicators of socio-economic status (i.e., some students might be “objectively” more optimistic), we wanted to control for their effect. Thus, we performed an ordinal logistic regression where students' civic knowledge, parental education, and their occupation status were entered as control variables, future outlooks as predictors, and academic aspirations expressed by students as the dependent variable. Even after controlling for indicators of SES and civic knowledge, students more optimistic about their future were 1.43 times more likely to expect to reach a higher ISCED level of education (95% CI [1.33, 1.54]) while those more pessimistic about the European future were 1.10 times more likely to expect lower educational attainment (OR = 0.91, 95% CI [0.84, 0.97]). Civic knowledge and parental occupational status were significant positive predictors while parental education was not significant in predicting the dependent variable.

Taken together, we can interpret our results from two perspectives. First, they support our expectations that worries about personal and societal futures are related and may (though we cannot assert this from our correlational study with certainty) both result in negative psychological and educational outcomes. This might be especially worrisome as sustained threats to well-being might have compounding effects or interact with other variables (which should be addressed in future studies). Second, it seems that various threats to the global future are perceived as more pertinent by students who are more optimistic, have achieved higher civic knowledge, and have higher academic aspirations. This might be because they are more informed and engaged in “public issues”, while those more pessimistic focus on more acute and personal problems. While this might be beneficial for their well-being in the short run, research shows that civic knowledge and participation are linked with a breath of positive psychological, health-related, and academic outcomes. Moreover, as (adverse) changes in the society seem inevitable, civic knowledge, engagement, and participation might foster the development of students’ competencies, sense of control, and self-efficacy to adapt efficiently to these changes (supported by correlations with optimism and less negative European future outlook). Therefore, anomie, societal retreat, and exclusion form the civic processes of students with lower aspirations and educational outcomes might hinder their flourishing in the society of tomorrow.

Authors

• Žan Lep, Educational Research Institute (Pedagoški inštitut) 68705093

• Eva Klemencic Mirazchiyski, Educational Research Institute (Pedagoški inštitut) 68705093

• Žiga Mekiš Recek, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana