Alexander K L, Entwisle D R
Johns Hopkins University.
Monogr Soc Res Child Dev. 1988;53(2):1-157.
How successfully children adapt to the routine of schooling in the first grade or two likely has long-term implications for their cognitive and affective development. This study aims to understand how home and school factors either facilitate or impede this process of adaptation by examining longitudinal data on cognitive performance for a large and diverse sample of youngsters over grades 1 and 2 in Baltimore City Public Schools. Report-card marks in reading and mathematics and scores on verbal and quantitative subtests of the California Achievement Test (CAT) battery over the 2-year period are the achievement criteria. The analysis directs attention to some of the social-structural (socioeconomic background, gender, and minority/majority status) and social-psychological (significant others and self-reactions) factors that shape youngsters' development during this period, as measured by changes in their cognitive standing. Racial comparisons (black youngsters vs. white) and comparisons by school year (first vs. second) highlight some key differences in the transition to full-time schooling. We find more numerous social-structural and social-psychological influences on CAT gains over the first year than over the second, and fall to spring stability in testing levels is more pronounced in the second year than in the first. This pattern identifies the first year of schooling as a period of considerable consequence for shaping subsequent achievement trajectories, and, for this reason, it may be especially important as a key to understanding black-white achievement differences. Minority and majority youngsters in this sample began school with similar CAT averages, but, by the end of the first year, blacks' performances lagged noticeably behind those of whites, and the cleavage widened over the second year. Blacks also received lower report-card marks than whites. This, along with smaller CAT gains, reveals that the transition to school is more problematic for blacks than it is for whites. We also observed stronger persistence of blacks' marks from one period to the next, indicating that recovering from these initial difficulties is more challenging. Social-psychological aspects of these early achievement patterns also differ by race in important ways: blacks' achievements are less influenced by parent variables than are those of whites, and black youngsters' self-expectations are less affected by the expectations held for them by their parents than are those of whites. These results and others are discussed in terms of their implications for students' development and for what they reveal about social structure in relation to the early schooling process.
儿童在一年级或二年级时对学校日常学习的适应程度如何，可能会对他们的认知和情感发展产生长期影响。本研究旨在通过研究巴尔的摩市公立学校一、二年级大量不同样本青少年的认知表现纵向数据，了解家庭和学校因素是如何促进或阻碍这一适应过程的。两年期间的阅读和数学成绩报告单分数以及加利福尼亚成就测验（CAT）系列的语言和定量子测验分数是成就标准。分析将注意力引向一些社会结构（社会经济背景、性别以及少数族裔/多数族裔身份）和社会心理（重要他人和自我反应）因素，这些因素通过青少年认知水平的变化来衡量，在这一时期塑造着他们的发展。种族比较（黑人青少年与白人）以及学年比较（一年级与二年级）凸显了向全日制学校过渡中的一些关键差异。我们发现，与第二年相比，第一年对CAT成绩提高的社会结构和社会心理影响更多，并且测试水平从秋季到春季的稳定性在第二年比第一年更为明显。这种模式表明，入学的第一年对于塑造后续的成就轨迹具有相当重要的意义，因此，作为理解黑白成就差异的关键，这可能尤为重要。本样本中的少数族裔和多数族裔青少年入学时的CAT平均分相近，但到第一年末，黑人的成绩明显落后于白人，且这种差距在第二年进一步扩大。黑人的成绩报告单分数也低于白人。这一点，再加上CAT成绩提高幅度较小，表明向学校过渡对黑人来说比白人更具问题。我们还观察到，黑人各阶段成绩的持续性更强，这表明从这些最初的困难中恢复过来更具挑战性。这些早期成就模式的社会心理方面在种族上也存在重要差异：与白人相比，黑人的成就受父母变量的影响较小，而且黑人青少年的自我期望受父母对他们期望的影响也小于白人。我们将根据这些结果对学生发展的影响以及它们所揭示的与早期学校教育过程相关的社会结构进行讨论。
