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You may have heard of something called the achievement gap, defined by the National Education Association “as the differences between the test scores of minority and/or low-income students and the test scores of their White and Asian peers.”

Maybe you heard it on the news, or this little thing called the Nation at Risk which came out in 1983 and called for the “reform of our educational system for the benefit of all.”

Now you may be thinking excitedly, yes! We finally see our problems and did something about our school systems, but have we actually improved it? Our Nations Report Card from the National Assessment of Educational Progress summarizes information from the standardized tests given to measure this. Depending on which achievement gap you are looking at you will get different results. Focusing on the White and African American results, the achievement gap has declined since the 1980s but is still large for all the resources we have available today. The graph below, which is interactive, shows the white and African American and white and Hispanic achievement gaps from the 1970s to 2012. As you can see, there is the general trend of decline, but some are still high in the achievement gap standard deviation. 

Typically, when we think of the achievement gap, we think of affluent versus underserved students which is defined as “students who do not receive equitable resources as other students in the academic pipeline,” according to Nicholas Highe and Jennifer Fisher. Unfortunately, the idea of poverty being a culture has been blamed for the relationship between race and socioeconomic factors and student achievement when in reality, structural racialization has been a major player. 

At this point you may be thinking, if all students in a school have access to the same resources and teachers, then why is the achievement gap still a big deal? Shouldn’t it almost be eliminated by now? On the surface one would think that, but we now know it is much more complicated than just doing better on a standardized test. 

So, what is affecting the achievement gap? This is the big question I wanted to know. We need to reach that deeper learning on how these problems are affecting our students and our possible implicit bias. The idea that poverty is a culture can play a role in this debated topic which is why as educators we need to reflect and seek the truth in how learning can be affected by these basic needs our students may not be getting.  This is why we need research. Being educated on topics we may think we know everything about is important in the field of education because we really only know the tip of the iceberg.

My next questions were how are nutrition and early resources at home affecting development? How does this development then play a role in learning? How is this learning then ultimately affecting the achievement gap? Let’s break this down.

We know food is important for our survival, but how does it affect our learning? According to Wilder Research, poor nutrition can lead to negative effects on students’ thinking and behavior in which leads to academic performance. Have you ever tried taking a test while your stomach was rumbling and found yourself fantasizing more about a steak dinner than your test? Imagine dealing with this everyday while being in class. Are you going to be paying attention to your teacher or your stomach? Not only does poor nutrition impact concentration, but also energy levels and brain function.

Without fuel for your brain, according to Fernando Gómez-Pinilla’s work from 2008,

“the ability of food-derived signals to influence energy metabolism and synaptic plasticity and, thus, mediate the effects of food on cognitive function.”  

Gómez-Pinilla, F. (2008). Brain foods: the effects of nutrients on brain function. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 9(7), 568–578

So, what does this mean? When we aren’t providing our brain with good nutritional food, our brain isn’t working at full capacity. That means the kind of foods our students are eating also affect learning and development. In the society we live in today, it is cheaper to buy less healthy foods like fast food restaurant products then it is to buy wholesome food at a grocery store. Under these conditions, underserved students may not get enough food, let alone the healthy foods their brains need for proper learning.  

The next question I wanted to know was how home resources may affect learning. If a student comes from a home where learning and reading were encouraged, lots of toys were provided for learning and developmental key stages, they will be much more prepared when starting school and possess the skills and development needed for their successful school career. A lack of educational materials for low income students produce low cognitive stimulation and enrichment (Wondering what these are?). Many agree that underserved students’ homes do not have these resources and experiences needed for proper cognitive development.

This also can include interactions with parents which can be key in cognitive development and learning. Christie Blazer provides some staggering statistics you can check out under the lack of educational activities and materials heading. Social, self, and moral developmental theories from Erik Erikson, Abraham Maslow, Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan also become important while students learn these other developments that can affect them overtime for life success (Need a brush up?). Resources in the home may be affecting development much more than one would expect.

If we think of everything that aids to proper cognitive development, which the book Educational Psychology by Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton refers to as

“a child’s development of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning and other aspects.”

Kelvin Seifert, & Rosemary Sutton. (2009). Educational Psychology (2nd ed.).

As we can see, many of those skills are affected by the two ecological factors discussed.

Thinking of both Jean Piaget’s cognitive development theory and Lev Vygotsky’s social development theory (Need to learn more?), we could see how these may affect a student’s development and executive function (Also need to learn more about EF?). If underserved students don’t have the opportunity to develop cognition as a child or interact culturally with social members to learn higher mental processes, they may not be at the same level as fellow peers that were provided those ecological factors. Both cognitive development and EF can cause difficulties when it comes to learning creating different levels of ability among students of the same age. If all these factors are affecting learning and development, what else are they affecting? Yep, you guessed, the achievement gap.

To make this easier, we could think of the staircase model like in the picture below.

By now you must be thinking, okay so learning is affecting development, but how is development affecting the achievement gap? If the average development, according to Educational Psychology, happens by building off the last stage or step in a hierarchy as some theories state, then development occurs as a process or staircase.

If an underserved student gets a late start on their cognitive, social, self, moral, or ethical development, they may not be on the same said “stairs” as their average peers and are still dependent learners. If learning ability isn’t yet at the same step as their peers, guess what is left? An achievement gap.

Here is another picture of a staircase, but do you notice what’s different? People are helping each other this time. Students and/or educators don’t need to feel like they have to tackle this problem all on their own. There are many classroom applications that can be used.

Collaborative learning can fill gaps in understanding between students who are independent learners to help dependent learners progress. We may need to provide underserved students with extra resources to create productive struggle. Activities could include hands on experiences or hypothetical questioning in order to generate and build brain power on the developmental stairs they are behind.

Scaffolding or giving students more organization in their tasks can help provide the push they need to challenge and grow their intellectual capacity.  The use of culturally responsive teaching and neuroscience can be applied to appropriately push the higher order thinking necessary for students to become independent learners.

Now of course there are always limitations. School budgets, teachers’ time constraints, individual situations and needs, outside of school factors all create variability in outcomes. But with the commitment of teachers, deep knowledge of brain-based principles and theories, and attentiveness of these risk factors, we can surely work on closing the achievement gap.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how we can support in providing some of the ecological factors that may be missing for underserved students. If we can assist in these, we can change the effect they have in development and in turn the achievement gap. Let me know your thoughts.

Interested in more factors that may be affecting our underserved students I didn’t discuss?

Each week we have new guest bloggers, follow us to stay in the loop – just click the follow button on the lower righthand side.

Sources:

A Nation At Risk [Evaluative Reports; Policy Guidance]. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html

Blazer, C., & Romanik, D. (n.d.). THE EFFECT OF POVERTY ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT. 24.

Common Causes of the Achievement Gaps. (2018, March 2). Retrieved from Corwin website: https://us.corwin.com/en-us/nam/equity-causes-of-achievement-gaps

Gómez-Pinilla, F. (2008). Brain foods: the effects of nutrients on brain function. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 9(7), 568–578. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2421

Highe, N. (n.d.). School Counselors Bridging the Gap Between Colleges, Careers, Underserved Students and Their Families. 22.

Kelvin Seifert, & Rosemary Sutton. (2009). Educational Psychology (2nd ed.).

Learning to Read and Write: What Research Reveals | Reading Rockets. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/learning-read-and-write-what-research-reveals

Research, W. (n.d.). Nutrition and Students’ Academic Performance. 10.

Saul McLeod. (2018). Vygotsky | Simply Psychology. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/vygotsky.html

Social development: relationships,personal motives, and morality | Educational Psychology. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/educationalpsychology/chapter/social-development-relationshipspersonal-motives-and-morality/

Students Affected by Achievement Gaps. (n.d.). Retrieved from NEA website: http://www.nea.org//home/20380.htm

The Educational Opportunity Monitoring Project: Racial and Ethnic Achievement Gaps. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://cepa.stanford.edu/educational-opportunity-monitoring-project/achievement-gaps/race/

yacobuca. (2019, May 16). Executive Function: building a toolkit to support teaching and learning about EF. Retrieved from summeredublog website: https://summeredublog.home.blog/2019/05/16/executive-function/

Zaretta Hammond. (2015). Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain. Sage Publications Ltd.