Race and Academic Disengagement
Psychological Disengagement
Psychological disengagement represents a coping mechanism that preserves a person's sense of self-worth in the face of negative feedback. For example, a student may discount a bad grade on an exam by framing it as an aberration, thereby preserving a 'good student' self-identity. Employing this coping mechanism has specific advantages, such as allowing the student to be persistent about achieving academic success despite receiving negative feedback (Nussbaum and Steele, 2007). On the other hand, psychological disengagement could facilitate a student framing academic success as irrelevant to their personal goals and future. Such students tend to perform poorly in school and suffer from increased dropout rates (reviewed by Stephan, Caudroit, Boiche, and Sarrazin, 2011). In contrast, students who are academically successful tend not to disengage, despite receiving a negative evaluation, and self-perceptions of their academic competency suffers accordingly. Understanding the mechanisms that encourages psychological disengagement therefore has important implications for academic success.
Self-Determination Theory proposes that the nature of academic motivation can have a significant impact on the prevalence and type of psychological disengagement. Students motivated by an intrinsic desire to be successful, who have integrated academic success into their value system or simply feel it is important to succeed academically, tend not to disengage (reviewed by Stephan, Caudroit, Boiche, and Sarrazin, 2011). In contrast, students who are not motivated (amotivated) to succeed academically tend to be chronically disengaged from the academic domain as a whole. The nature of the motivation for academic success therefore plays an important role in determining the likelihood of becoming psychologically disengaged from academic feedback.
Another factor that influences academic disengagement is race or ethnicity. Major and colleagues (1998) compared levels of disengagement between African-American and Caucasian (White) students after they took a test designed to measure their intellectual abilities. African-American students appear to be primed to protect themselves from negative academic feedback, by relying on a generalized assumption that academic tests in the United States are racially biased against them. This was revealed by the finding that the self-esteem of African-American students was higher than their White counterparts after a negative evaluation, but only if...
Bandura, A. (1999). Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193-209. Discusses the moral agency embedded in socio-cognitive theory and other self-regulatory mechanisms responsible for restraining immoral personal behavior. Focuses primarily on specific factors that lead to moral disengagement, in which individual root justification for immoral behavior. Author sheds light on the importance of having a moral agency and dangers of not have one. He
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