Role models have long been thought to play an important role in young peoples’ development. The present study explores the ways that race- and gender-matched role models can provide young people with a greater sense of the opportunities available to them in the world. A longitudinal study of young adolescents (N = 80) revealed that students who reported having at least one race- and gender-matched role model at the beginning of the study performed better academically up to 24 months later, reported more achievement-oriented goals, enjoyed achievement-relevant activities to a greater degree, thought more about their futures, and looked up to adults rather than peers more often than did students without a race- and gender-matched role model. These effects held only for race- and gender-matched role models—not for non-matched role models. Finally, the results held irrespective of the educational achievements of the specific role model. Data are discussed in terms of their implications for our understanding of the ways that young people become invested in academic pursuits and the means by which we might be able to assist goal development among young people.
This article explores the assumption that the goals on which an individual works structure the experience of daily life. One set of important goals are those consensual tasks that reflect the age-graded expectations of a living environment (e.g., the task of being on one's own at college). Whereas most members of a common age group share these consensual life tasks, individuals in a group differ in the relative importance they place on different tasks and in their appraisals of them. In the present study of 54 women living in a college sorority, the importance of a life task was associated with increased relevance of the task to daily life events, as revealed in experience sampling. The women were more emotionally involved in events that they saw as highly relevant to their life tasks than in less relevant events and, for each person, positive affect and emotional involvement in task-relevant events were related to her initial life task appraisals.A critical issue when studying personality and daily life experience is to find units of analysis that simultaneously reflect the personality of the individual and the features of the life context in which daily life experience takes shape (Caspi, Bolger, & Eckenrode, 1987;Magnusson We aie pleased to acknowledge the technical assistance of Nancy Exelby and the comments on this article by
Two experiments and 2 field studies examine how college students’ perceptions of their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professors’ mindset beliefs about the fixedness or malleability of intelligence predict students’ anticipated and actual psychological experiences and performance in their STEM classes, as well as their engagement and interest in STEM more broadly. In Studies 1 (N = 252) and 2 (N = 224), faculty mindset beliefs were experimentally manipulated and students were exposed to STEM professors who endorsed either fixed or growth mindset beliefs. In Studies 3 (N = 291) and 4 (N = 902), we examined students’ perceptions of their actual STEM professors’ mindset beliefs and used experience sampling methodology (ESM) to capture their in-the-moment psychological experiences in those professors’ classes. Across all studies, we find that students who perceive that their professor endorses more fixed mindset beliefs anticipate (Studies 1 and 2) and actually experience (Studies 3 and 4) more psychological vulnerability in those professors’ classes—specifically, they report less belonging in class, greater evaluative concerns, greater imposter feelings, and greater negative affect. We also find that in-the-moment experiences of psychological vulnerability have downstream consequences. Students who perceive that their STEM professors endorse more fixed mindset beliefs experience greater psychological vulnerability in those professors’ classes, which in turn predict greater dropout intentions, lower class attendance, less class engagement, less end-of-semester interest in STEM, and lower grades. These findings contribute to our understanding of how students’ perceptions of professors’ mindsets can serve as a situational cue that affects students’ motivation, engagement, and performance in STEM.
Life tasks serve as an avenue for individuals to give personal meaning to their lives and to organize personal effort and activities. The present data, from a longitudinal study of the transition to college life, demonstrate how construals of life tasks can help to illuminate individuals' activity choices and affective experience of daily life activities. Ss who were absorbed in the task of "being on my own, away from family," also invested their academic activities with special significance. They experienced more stress and less satisfaction from their (considerabie) academic accomplishments than did those who framed their tasks in more concrete terms. Experience-sampling data showed that activity choices followed from life task concerns, even when such activities were particularly anxiety-provoking. Discussion considers how similar life task themes may be enacted differently in other contexts.Life tasks are the consciously accessible goals that people care about at a given point in time (Cantor, in press;Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987). They are the important, affectively charged, and self-relevant concerns that people are working on in their lives. Life tasks represent the hopes and dreams of the individual, reflecting a personal history and a way of seeing the world. They are those tasks that individuals consider important: areas of excitement, opportunity, and vulnerability.We conceive of these life tasks as goals that people are working toward achieving-goals in which they have invested some of their sense of self. People are personally involved in the outcome of these tasks, which provide an important framework for understanding their behavior, cognition, and affect. The present study is an empirical investigation of the role that life tasks play in the everyday lives of college students as they make a transition from home and high school to college life. Beginning here with the task of being on one's own, away from family, which is a rather general age-graded task that is open to multiple specific approaches, we contrast the experiences of two groups of students in the transition: a group for whom this appears to be one central task concern with higher-order meaning that is also reflected in other life task arenas, and another group for whom the routine chores of being newly independent at college take on a more concrete, delimited, and nonexistential meaning. These students' differential initial concern about self-development, and their personal ways of giving meaning to it in diverse arenas of college life, color their experiences in college and their choices of activities to pursue. Life Tasks and Other Goal ConstructsThere is a growing literature in personality psychology focusing on individuals' consciously accessible, personal goals (e.g.,The research and preparation of this article were supported in part by National Science Foundation Grants BNS 84-11778 and BNS 87-18467. We appreciate the technical assistance of Nancy G. Exelby and comments on this work from
think tanks, which, unlike universities, send out press releases. The lack of clear and certain results in much of education research, as well as the lack of a small set of peer-reviewed flagship journals, contributed to the media's failure to publicize peer-reviewed research in popular education reporting. (49 ref)-
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