Enhancing Young Children's Engagement in LearningFriday, April 16, 2004
Rubloff Auditorium at Loyola Water Tower Campus
Registration: 8:00am to 9:00am Symposium: 9:00am to 12:00pm
About the SymposiumWhat's Fun Got to Do With It?
E. Tory Higgins, Ph.D. Educators, whether parents or professional teachers, often believe that making an activity more enjoyable will increase children's interest. To that aim, educators give instructions to have "fun" with the activity, or they add a "fun" component. The basic psychological literature seems to support the belief that adding fun to the activity should make it more emotionally pleasant and more rewarding. However, recent research has shown how adding fun to an activity can undermine rather than enhance interest in it. Dr. Higgins discussed two different ways in which adding fun can undermine interest. First, he presented evidence that adding a fun component to an activity causes children to switch back and forth between this component and the original activity, a process that can decrease subsequent interest in the activity. Then, he described research suggesting that instructing children to have fun with a task could make children "feel wrong" about what they are doing and perform less well, if they previously had believed the task was important but not fun. Finally, he discussed how fun can be added to an activity without undermining interest or performance. E. Tory Higgins is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology and Professor of Management at Columbia University. A leading researcher in motivation science, his recent research has discovered new answers to the question of where values come from in everyday goal pursuits. He has received a MERIT Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Donald T. Campbell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology, the William James Fellow Award for Distinguished Achievements from the American Psychological Society, and the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions.
Creating Learning Environments That Safeguard Students' Identities Claude Steele, Ph.D. Differences in the educational performance of varying groups are largely the product of inequalities in educational opportunity for the members of those groups. But some group differences in performance persist even when opportunity is considered roughly equal. Dr. Steele's research examines how a student's performance is put under powerful pressure in areas where the abilities of one's group are negatively stereotyped. This pressure, or "stereotype threat," can be significant enough to shape student's intellectual performance and academic identities. Dr. Steele demonstrated the powerful, interfering effects of stereotype threat on the academic performance of women in math and on minorities more generally, as well as the interfering effects of this threat on a broad range of other performances such as sports, language usage, and emotional sensitivity, and on other groups. He also demonstrated that when this pressure is alleviated, performances can improve dramatically, even for those who consistently perform poorly. Finally, Dr. Steele described new research showing that the very sense of having a group identity is significantly rooted in the perception that one is under threat because of that identity. He concluded with approaches that have been applied successfully to specific group underperformance problems, and that address the larger problem of managing a diverse society. Claude Steele is the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences at Stanford University. His theory of "self-affirmation" describes processes for coping with self-image threat. His theory of "stereotype threat" describes how negative group stereotypes, through the self-evaluative and belongingness threats they pose, can affect important behaviors like intellectual performance and intergroup relations. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Gordon Allport Prize, the William James Fellow Award and the Senior Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest from the American Psychological Association.
|
