Self-perceptions, temperament, socioemotional adjustment and the perceptions of parental support of chronically underachieving children
Introduction
Although they have no intellectual disability, no identifiable neurological impairments nor any learning disorders, some children perform poorly in school and exhibit, in different levels of severity, a discrepancy between expected achievement based on their intellectual ability assessment scores and actual achievement. Commonly considered as underachievers, there is no consensus as to the age these children develop this problem. As children advance in school, there is a corresponding increase in difficulty of school subjects and assignments; thus, children's performance depends progressively more on their motiviation to sustain an active commitment to and efforts toward self-regulated learning (Bouffard, Boisvert, & Vezeau, 2003). This may explain why, although underachievement may exist among younger children, it becomes more manifest by the late elementary school levels.
As Baker, Bridger, and Evans (1998) remind us, the roots of underachievement often lie within the child, although family- and school-related factors may contribute to the problem (Rimm, 1986). Disruptive situations or events in children's school or family environment may lower motivation and result in temporary underachievement. Chronic underachievement lasting over prolonged periods of time is a more pervasive form likely to engender severe problems similar to those of learning disabled children. This paper focuses on children who exhibit chronic underachievement over a 3-year period.
Current work on learning highlights the complex and multiple interactive impacts of psychological, personal, and social processes on children's school motivation and achievement (Järvela, 2001; Vauras, Salonen, Lehtinen, & Lepola, 2001). Children bring to school important resources such as intellectual aptitudes, language abilities and skills that contribute directly to learning. They also bring temperamental dispositions that may operate directly and indirectly on their engagement, self-regulation and persistence, thus contributing positively or negatively to their learning.
Researchers do not necessarily concur on a single definition of temperament (Buss & Plomin, 1984; Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey, & Fisher, 2001; Thomas & Chess, 1977), but authors of different theoretical approaches agree that individual differences in children's temperament are related to differences in academic achievement. Adaptive school functioning requires that children's characteristics and abilities fit the school's demands and that their behaviors and attitudes are consistent with their teacher's expectations (Lerner, Lerner, & Zabski, 1985). To do so, children must have a repertoire of self-regulatory resources such as the capacity to control their activity level, to pay attention to the teacher and to remain focused on a task despite extraneous stimuli around them, to persist and to resist temptations to give up in face of difficulties, to adapt to changing and challenging instructional demands and activities, and to control negative emotional reactions elicited when encountering frustration and failure. A substantial body of research has documented important links between aspects of children's temperament and school readiness, adjustment, and achievement (Bramlett, Scott, & Rowell, 2000; Coplan, Barber, & Lagacé-Séguin, 1999; Guerin, Gottfried, Oliver, & Thomas, 1994; Martin (1989), Martin (1994); Martin, Olejnik, & Gaddis, 1994; Martin, Wisenbaker, & Huttenen, 1994; Maziade, Côté, Boutin, Boudreault, & Thivierge, 1986; Mobley & Pullis, 1991; Newman, Noel, Chen, & Matsopoulos, 1998; Schoen & Nagle, 1994). Problems of persistence, of distractibility, of regulation, of level of activity, and of emotional reactivity are among the dimensions commonly linked to poor school achievement. Thus, temperamental characteristics appear to be a relevant factor to consider when studying underachievement.
Beyond children's characteristics, parental support and attitudes towards their child's learning are social resources likely to be involved in the child's attitudes towards adjustment in school. Parents are generally concerned about their children's education and they are stressed at having a child who fails to achieve as expected. It has been shown that, as a reaction to children's school functioning and performance, parents adjust their perceptions of their child's competence accordingly (Aunola, Nurmi, Niemi, Lerkkanen, & Rasku-Puttonen, 2002; Marcoux, 2002). Many researchers hold that not only are children aware of their parents’ perceptions and feelings about their achievement, but also internalize this evaluation (Bouffard et al., 2003; Eccles-Parsons, 1983; Eccles, Adler, & Kaczala, 1982; Eisenberg, Martin, & Fabes, 1996; Meece & Courtney, 1992; Phillips, 1987; Phillips & Zimmerman, 1990; Wigfield et al., 1997). For underachievers, this may only reinforce their negative self-beliefs about themselves. However, children's beliefs of parents’ emotional availability, warmth, and acceptance can operate as a protective factor in the socioemotional well-being of these children (Harter, 1999; Hoge, Smit, & Hanson, 1990; Juvonen & Bear, 1992; Kloomok & Cosden, 1994; Robinson, 1995).
Several studies suggest that children who maintain low achievement over prolonged periods of time are, like children with learning disorders, at risk for negative outcomes and are more likely to experience adjustment problems than their typically developing peers (Morrison & Cosden, 1997; Wenz-Gross & Siperstein, 1998). Studies of chronic underachievers, including among gifted children, indicate that these children have low self-esteem and low perceived competence for learning (Bear, Minke, & Manning, 2002), a fear of failure and higher levels of perfectionism (Adderholt-Elliott, 1991; Rimm, 1988), greater peer rejection, loneliness, emotional sensitivity and stress (Freeman, 1994) as well as more emotional problems (Margalit & Levin-Alyagon, 1994; Morrison & Cosden, 1997; Van Boxtel & Monks, 1992) than their peers.
However, McCall, Beach, and Lau (2000) argue that because several methodological limitations are involved in most studies of underachievement, we still know very little about it. Underachievement is defined as the child's failure to perform academically at a level commensurate with his or her measured potential. Following McCall et al. (2000), the arbitrary and inconsistent cut-offs from study to study for test scores and grades that are used to identify underachievers lead us to believe that these studies would have more to say about children who achieve poorly than about underachievers per se. Also, studies of underachievement often involve select samples, particularly gifted children. Therefore, these studies do not allow for the disentangling of characteristics associated with underachievement from those associated with the select nature of the group under investigation. Hence, conclusions issued from these studies can hardly be generalized to normative samples. Finally, studies of underachievement usually compare underachievers to non-underachievers without distinguishing in the latter group those who achieve at the expected level from those who achieve at a higher level than expected. Combining those who achieve normally and those who overachieve may increase the differences with the underachievers.
This paper reports on a study comparing self-perceptions, perceived parental support, temperament and socioemotional adjustment of elementary school children who, for three consecutive years, presented a steady level of achievement below, above or in the range of that predicted by their mental ability. The study's second goal was to examine whether children's perceptions of parental support act as a factor that can promote positive self-perceptions and socioemotional adjustment.
Children's self-perceptions include academic perceived competence, negative perfectionism, self-esteem, and beliefs of peer acceptance. The following temperamental dimensions, already shown as linked to school achievement, were assessed: level of attention, distractibility, adaptability, rythmicity and emotional reactivity. Socioemotional adjustment is a multidimensional construct encompassing both personal and social indicators of well-being. In this current study, the indicators used were children's manifestations of withdrawal, insecurity, conduct problems, negative perfectionism, self-regulation, and openness and collaboration with peers.
Data on global self-esteem, academic perceived competence, perfectionism, peer acceptance and parental support were collected from children along with an individually administered ability test aimed at measuring their mental ability. Children's academic achievement corresponds to their year-end general grade point average scores, provided by the schools, computed across school subjects for each child. Multiple sources to evaluate children's socioemotional adjustment were utilized to reduce shared method variance. So teachers and parents provided information on children's manifestation of withdrawal, insecurity, negative perfectionism conduct problems, self-regulation, and openness and willingness to collaborate with peers. Parents also provided information about the family demographics and filled out a questionnaire regarding the temperamental characteristics of their child. Data on children's mental ability and academic achievement were collected over three consecutive years in order to identify those children whose achievement remained similar across this period of time. All other data were collected only once during the third year of the study.
In order to identify underachievers, we used the procedure proposed by McCall et al. (2000). As a first step, in order to take into account potential differences between schools and grade levels, general grade point average scores and mental ability test scores were standardized between schools and grade levels. Correlations between general grade point average scores and mental ability test scores were, respectively, 0.64, 0.59, and 0.60 at each of the 3 school years. Between years correlations of scores on the mental ability test were high (ranged from 0.80 to .83) as were the correlations of general grade point average scores (ranged from 0.81 to 0.84).
For each of the 3 school years, we performed regressions of children's general grade point average scores on their mental ability test scores. As McCall et al. (2000) have proposed, children whose standardized residuals from the regression line were equal to or less than −1.00 (i.e. children whose scores were more than one standard error of estimate below the predicted value based on their test scores) were defined as underachievers. We adapted this procedure to define as overachievers children whose standardized residuals from the regression line were equal to or more than 1.00 (i.e. children whose scores were more than one standard error of estimate over the predicted value based on their test scores). Finally, all other children were defined as standard achievers. The criterion of inclusion in the present study was to have been labeled with a similar level of achievement for three successive years.
Section snippets
Sample
The initial sample comprised 565 third graders (mean age=8.6 years old, SD=5.8) and fourth graders (mean age=9.7 years old, SD=5.9) who were just starting to participate in a larger longitudinal study that examined the development of children's accuracy of self-perceptions. Children were recruited from 10 public schools in the Montreal area and all were French speaking. 339 children met the criterion of similar labeling for three successive years, but due to missing questionnaires from 30
Results
Preliminary analyses examined effects of gender and school level on all dependent variables. No main or interaction effects were observed for school level, whereas only one effect of gender was observed: both parents and teachers considered girls as exhibiting more active self-regulation than boys. Also, although the percentage of boys classified in the underachievement group (22.9%) was slightly higher, it did not differ significantly from the percentage of girls (14%) classified in the same
Discussion
The current study provides interesting findings about children's emotional adjustment linked to level of achievement and perceptions of parental support. This study is original with regard to the procedure and the criterion used to select underachievers, the distinction between standard achievers and overachievers, and compared information from both parents and teachers about the socioemotional adjustment children exhibit at home and at school.
Similar to the results reported by McCall et al.
Acknowledgments
Data collection and preparation of this article were supported by grants from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Government of Canada) and the Fonds Québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture (Government of Quebec).
The authors thank the principals, teachers, students and parents for their participation. They also thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on a previous version of this paper.
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