Complex Learning• Ideal Student
In this research project, we asked American and Chinese 5th grade students and their teachers to identify the five most important characteristics of an ideal student. Chinese students in public and private schools in China and American students in private schools valued learning-oriented traits (e.g., explains and understands deeply, knows when one makes mistakes), while American public school students were concerned mostly with good behavior in class (e.g., does not fight, sits still during lectures) (See Figure).
The Figure presents the percentages of students and teachers from each nation and school type who mentioned learning or behavioral properties for their ideal students. As is shown, each group of students highly valued learning properties, except the American public school students. They gave more emphasis to behavioral properties instead. Particularly important to notice, the American public school teachers also emphasized behavior in their ideal students more than the other groups of teachers. In the U.S. public school classes, there was a strong correlation between each teacher and his or her students’ rating of their ideal learner within the classroom. Among the three classes from which we collected data, one class had almost twice as many students who put more emphasis on learning than behaving, and this accorded with the teacher’s ideal student.
When these results and the contrasts among the schools were brought to the U.S. public school teachers’ attention, they expressed surprise about their students’ images of schooling, and they began to reflect on what they had been doing, how to improve their own practice, and how to reintroduce learning as a central part of the students’ belief system.
These results have several important implications. First, contrasting one’s own classrooms with other classrooms can help illuminate specific beliefs that warrant reflection and modification. Second, studies of this kind highlight the importance of helping teachers reflect upon their own classroom culture. Finally, the difference in students’ beliefs about learning and schooling can also result from a school’s cultural context and teachers’ attitudes, not just from factors such as ethnicity and poverty. To support this claim, consider that the difference between private and public schools in the U.S. (within culture) is larger than the difference between U.S. private and Chinese private and public schools (across-cultures). Such differences could not be simply due to socio-economic status differences because most students from the Chinese public schools in the study came from a low economic class. Therefore, it is important to consider three variables in the data analysis: classroom practice, socio-economic status (SES), and ethnicity.
We are extending these findings by asking a new set of questions to a greater variety of cultural communities within the United States. In this new research, we use the prior findings to create an electronic database to help teachers and students identify those traits that they associate with a “good student” and a “good classroom.” We focus on the common and different elements in the beliefs of teachers and students, and how SES, classroom practice, and ethnicity may play a role in defining those beliefs. We also want to explore whether teachers and parents will find it useful to understand such ideals of the students and their possible cultural links.
