As a former education researcher and prospective teacher, it is my goal to bring these two fields closer together for, in my opinion, they do not inform each other frequently enough. Too often, in my research, I witnessed programs that were developed and analyzed in a vacuum, uninformed by the realities of the contemporary classroom context; conversely, in schools, too often a “nose to the grindstone” operating mentality means that there is little time to consider what research is saying might support students’ achievement. With regards to noncognitive factors, I am pleased to see this element of schooling, which progressive educators have long acknowledged as integral to student success (Kohn, 2008) gaining recognition in the research and policy realms. In fact, just last year, the federal government added “noncognitive outcomes” as a priority area for their Investing in Innovation (I3) education grants, and as a result, researchers began scrambling to conceptualize how these factors, defined by what they are not*, could be articulated and measured. As I worked to explore the ways in which our target program’s classroom intervention influenced student success beyond grades and test scores, I found the aforementioned CCSR framework most helpful. The CCSR framework is arguably the most comprehensive review of the research on noncognitive outcomes to date, including perspectives from a wide variety of fields ranging from education research to public policy, psychology, and economics. This framework conceives of noncognitive outcomes as affective states that are largely influenced by the classroom experience, positive behaviors and habits that are productive towards school achievement, and ultimately academic outcomes that reflect the aforementioned internal processes and behaviors and that are integral to academic success (Farrington et. al, 2012).
This focus on affective states was particularly new to me in this research, and it struck a chord as a “missing link” so to speak between what a school and or teacher provides in a school, and what a student does as a result of his or her school experience. The affective response of a student can be defined as the way that a student processes or feels his or her experiences at school. That is, the affective response of a student to his or her schooling moderates the relationship between the "inputs" of the school experience and the "outputs" of the academic behavior of the student within school. When I considered this framework with regards to my own practice when developing my Practice Framework over the summer (Artifact 1), I attempted to highlight the classroom experiences, affective responses and signs of student engagement and achievement that I prioritized.
In the remainder of this portfolio, I will focus in on a single aspect of this practice framework, self-efficacy, for reasons I will next explain. Throughout the following sections I will present the research on self-efficacy, and then explore the ways in which I tried to cultivate it in my classroom as well as some possible student reactions.
