Chan (1994) says that students may ‘… not know how to try harder’. She concludes that ‘One potentially effective technique is to combine … an attribution retraining program with cognitive strategy training’, that attributional retraining will ‘… promote functional motivational orientations’ and that ‘… apart from teaching students the use of cognitive strategies for learning, teachers should also try to convince students that their learning successes or failures are attributable to the use of effective or ineffective strategies.’ (ibid. p. 337)
A student’s reputation may go before them. An assessment of a student may arrive with, or ahead of, the student. Such an assessment will - it is inevitable - alter the perceptions and expectations of, and consequently attitudes towards and approaches to, the student. An early, if ethically notorious, demonstration of this effect was ‘Pygmalion in the Classroom’ (Rosenthal & Jacobson 1968). These researchers simply doctored infant school reports. Randomly selected children had glowing reports written for them, identifying them as ‘bloomers’ (gifted children, with high-flying potential). These ‘bloomers’ went on, over long periods, to better than expected success in school. This must have been due simply to the perception of them by their subsequent teachers, who had read their excellent reports. The perception of these children as specially gifted must have resulted in very different attitudes towards, and different pedagogical approaches to, the children fortunate enough to have had their records thus falsified. Indeed, when directly questioned teachers did report more positive experience with, and higher expectations, of these ‘bloomers’. This strong effect has been confirmed in less ethically controversial research since ‘Pygmalion’.
Perceptions, of student and teacher, obviously matter. They are, though, let us remember, constructs. Being constructs they are fallible. We are at risk of making those ‘false assumptions’ described by Westwood. I think we probably make many such. Particularly when informed, with apparent authority, that a particular student is very clever indeed, or rather slow, or perhaps that they are ‘dyslexic’, it is impossible not to form a prejudgement. A psychologically well-informed saint might keep an open and positive mind but a busy teacher may not always reach sainthood. A teacher who absorbs, however unconsciously, a diagnosis of a student’s innate low ability (not to mention an actual disability like ‘dyslexia’) will form a prejudice to match. However unconsciously, and however genuinely undesired, this will manifest itself in teaching approach, expectations and attitude. (Kerr 1999, 2001 [b] & notes to chapter eight.) It will also, however unconsciously, communicate itself to the student. A degree of learned helplessness, in fact, will arise, and it will do this in all parties.
Nobody is perfect, not even you and me. It can safely, indeed it must, be assumed that our perceptions are a patchy lot. Some may be true, more or less, some will be more positive than the truth and some more negative. However ‘rational’ we try to be, this will always be the pattern of it and it will always affect the way we feel and behave. We will only rarely be conscious of much, or even any, of this. Is all lost, then, in a malodorous miasma of emotional and psychological surge and backlash? I think not.
I am ever more certain that the impact of affect, of the emotions, on performance, especially on literacy performance is very substantial. Positive experience empowers and enables; the phrase from strength to strength comes to mind. Negative experience, however, even in moderate amount, is frankly traumatic. Such trauma inevitably has lasting consequences, all of them deeply inimical to learning. These can be subsumed, rather generally speaking, under one or other of the umbrella terms learned helplessness or anxiety. Antidotes include success and meta-cognitive and attributional training, but affect itself can also be specifically managed.
Affect is much disregarded in the debate about where literacy difficulty comes from. Affect is regularly, and most sympathetically, mentioned as a sorry side-effect of literacy difficulty. It is, though, surprisingly and strikingly under-, or dis-, regarded as a possible cause of this difficulty and has barely been studied in its own right, in this context. It is interesting to speculate why this might be. Are we unconsciously protecting some status quo? Is it too scary? Too problematic? Too personal? Might it shift our focus onto embarrassing explanations and inconvenient conclusions? Or is it too mundane and everyday, too easily understood by the man on the Clapham omnibus perhaps? Does it fail to raise the scientific heart-rate enough, or to demand sufficient, and sufficiently esoteric, jargon to excite academic ambition?