Poster #78 - Equity of Access: (Pre-)Adolescents’ Proposed Solutions to a Complex School Policy Dilemma

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

In an era of persistent questions about whose responsibility it is to ensure compliance with community rules and norms, it often falls to educators to implement discipline and reasonable consequences for children who may face challenging choices in school and out. However, little research to date has investigated children’s relationship to how their community treats delinquent classroom behaviors on a school-wide scale (cf. LaRusso & Selman, 2011). Yet the growth of self-directed, but school-regulated, learning contexts in upper elementary and middle school classrooms necessitates a clear understanding of what conditions students think are effective and how those may change over the course of development.

The present study expands this understanding by examining students’ written responses to a prompt about a hypothetical situation, in which their school’s policy of providing iPads for each child in a classroom is reversed following a cyberbullying incident (see Figure 1). In addition to tracking students’ proposed solutions to the problem and the developmental differences that emerged, we used validated instruments to investigate the distribution and frequency of those solutions in light of the respective classroom climates, students’ social perspective-taking skills (‘SPT’), their standardized ELA test scores, and their deep reading comprehension ability.

We analyzed 407 essays written by students in grades 4 and 7 enrolled in schools in a single district in the northeastern US, which at the time were participating in a randomized controlled trial of Word Generation (Snow, Lawrence, & White, 2009). The analysis used a combined emic/etic coding scheme that sought and categorized all instances in which students suggested solutions to the principal’s policy reversal. The development of the coding scheme, based on 40 of the essays, led to the proposal of six categories of solutions (see Table 1 for within-category code types and for examples): Content Restriction, Access Limitation, Monitoring, Punishment, Explicit Address, and Personal Responsibility.

Categorical outcome data were analyzed using hierarchical regression models that controlled for the significant variation in essay length across students and captured the nesting of students within classrooms. Despite 4th-graders writing longer essays than 7th-graders, descriptive analyses revealed largely similar distributions of proposed solutions across five of the six detected types. The exception to this tendency was the Content Restriction category, which 7th-graders used 32% more often than 4th-graders, a significant difference. While no demographic covariates (sex, FRL eligibility, race/ethnicity) predicted significant variance in the provision of solutions, students’ deep reading comprehension skill did. Critically, a key SPT skill (‘articulation’) was significantly correlated with 7th-graders’, but not 4th-graders’, tendency to provide any solution, and was higher in the group of students who proposed at least one Personal Responsibility solution. Exploring the grade difference in the recommendation of Content Restriction solutions revealed that 7th-grade girls were nearly twice as likely as any other subgroup to recommend this type of action. No relationships between classroom climate and the outcomes were detected. The implications of these results for the development of students’ perspectives on classroom discipline will be discussed.

Authors

• Nan Mu, University of Alabama
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lisa Hsin, Harvard University
  Presenting Author