Get your own Free Home PageA Study of Student Achievement Versus Teacher Methodology Involving Students from Loneman Day School, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Oglala, South Dakota
In the many sources of cultural values, economic factors rank high in determining the patterns of belief and response which characterize a society. The way in which its members make a living from natural resources is of prime significance in understanding social motivation. As long as the ecology of a culture remains intact, behavior indigenous to that ecology is normal to that culture.
When the economic basis of a culture is destroyed and its natural ecology disrupted, the values that originally arose from that economy tend to remain active and alive but relatively inoperable in the changed culture. This is the current history of the great Sioux nation. When the buffalo was taken away, their natural economic basis was removed, their ecology disrupted, and an alien culture tried to force a new economy upon them. This economy bore no relation to their traditional values.
The nomadic Sioux, unlike the peaceful Pueblos whose values arose from an agrarian economy, could not exercise their traditional responses when their natural ecology was ruined. Even though their high valuation of physical bravery, generosity, individual autonomy, good advice, and leisure were still vibrant and active, these response patterns did not reflect the White culture (Macgregor, 1946).
Immersed in the alien, White-American culture, which forced new and conflicting patterns of belief upon them, the Sioux met constant frustration. Changes arising from such frustration were psychologically inevitable. For instance, the refusal of the Sioux to accept the White man's value of working from eight to five in exchange for money or goods, led to charges of his being lazy. The great Sioux values of individual autonomy and appreciation of leisure also made the White man regard him as irresponsible.
The White man's behavior was and is demanded of the Sioux even though the latter does not share the values from which that behavior would psychologically follow. It may, therefore, be reasonably theorized that this clashing of cultural values should have adverse effects on the educational performance of Sioux Indian students due to negative feelings of White instructors about Sioux Indian values. This area of teacher expectation constitutes the focus of this study.
The purpose of this study was to determine if the preferred teaching method of different educators would have a significant influence on the academic achievement of selected students from Loneman Day School located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation at Oglala, South Dakota.
It is the observation of educators of Sioux Indians that, apart from an initial, native shyness, Sioux youngsters are perfectly normal in their responses when they first come to school. Within a few years Sioux Indian students, as a group, do not come even close to national norms on standardized tests (Loneman, 1992). By the end of the third grade, these children range from six months to a year and a half behind standardized achievement norms. Their I.Q.'s, however, are normal (Loneman, 1992). This lag in achievement continues, more or less, throughout their school years.
In summary, the educational achievement of Sioux students after about the fourth grade is considerably less than that of White students. This may be because the student has adopted the perceived Non-Indian viewpoint that he* is not as capable of learning as a White student. Another possibility for his lack of achievement is the methodology used by his teachers. Each year Sioux students achieve slightly better than the previous year, and Sioux students living in non- reservation environments achieve better than Sioux students on reservations (Anderson et al, 1953).
* Masculine pronoun refers to either gender.
Acculturation: Intercultural borrowing between diverse peoples resulting in new and blended patterns.
Achievement: Quality and quantity of a student's work during a given period.
Agrarian: Of or relating to farmers or farming interests.
Coextensive: Having the same scope or extent in space or time.
Culture: A particular form or stage of civilization.
Curriculum: A course of study offered by a school or one of its divisions.
Ecology: The pattern of relations between organisms and their environment.
Economy: Manner of arrangement or functioning.
Ethos: The distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of a person, group, or institution.
Indigenous: Produced, growing, or living naturally in a particular region.
Methodology: The processes, techniques, approaches, or procedures employed in teaching.
Natural science: A science that deals with matter, energy, and their interrelations and transformations or with objectively measurable phenomena.
It can be assumed that there is an ascertainable cause of the observed breakdown in achievement. It may also be assumed that causes are other than intellectual since average I.Q.'s are present at the beginning of the educational process. It is hypothesized, therefore, that the impact of Sioux-White value conflicts, occurring throughout the school years, creates in the Sioux student adjustmental and personality deviations which hamper achievement. It is further hypothesized that boys will be affected by these conflicts more than girls. That is, if the teacher imposes White values rigidly on the student, the resulting conflict experienced by the student will result in lower achievement. Therefore, if the Teacher Attitude Inventory indicates this imposition, achievement as indicated by the California Achievement Test or The Stanford Achievement Test will be lower.
Therefore, the null hypotheses are:
Prior to beginning the study, the students to be evaluated were selected on the basis of continuous attendance from among students at Loneman Day School.
This study was restricted to 17 of the 22 Oglala Sioux students from Loneman Day School completing the seventh grade in 1992. Loneman Day School is located at Oglala, South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Girls constitute 11 of the 17 students studied. These 17 students have attended Loneman Day School since kindergarten. During their education they had nine teachers. Eight of the teachers were female, four of which were Sioux Indian.
The testing instruments used are A Teacher Attitude Inventory (TAI), The California Achievement Test (CAT) Form E, and the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT) Eighth Edition. The TAI is a descriptive instrument designed to measure teacher attitudes regarding education. It is composed of 24 items presented in a five-point Likert- type format with two contrasting educational positions at the opposite poles. The TAI allows for tabulation of a total score and four subscale scores. The subscales include items on: Controlling vs. Releasing, Rigidity vs. Flexibility, Individualism vs. Group-Orientation, and Interest vs. Disinterest in Professionalism. Since these divergent views characterize White vs. Sioux values, this test was chosen.
The CAT is widely used to compare achievement of students, within subtests, from year to year. This test has a median reliability of at least .88 on all content- area subtests. The correlation on the CAT Form E and total scale score on the Test of Cognitive Skills ranges from .6 at level 13 to .8 at level 16. The within-level Kuder-Richardson 20 internal consistency reliabilities, for the subtests and total score, range in the high .6s and .7s at the kindergarten and early first grade levels to the high .8s and .9s at all other levels. Except at extreme score levels, the standard errors indicate reliable measurement. Stability reliabilities for tests in levels 10 through 15 are in the .8 to .95 range, with a median across subset values of approximately .85 for the reading, language, and mathematics tests.
The SAT Eighth Edition is comparable to the CAT in testing student achievement. This test has a Kuder- Richardson 20 range of .8 to .9 on each subtest and the composite. The Standard Error of Measurement (SEM) has been computed to range from 2.1 to 4.9 for the different subtests. As with any standardized test, the validity depends on which tested objectives are included in the school curriculum.
Normal curve equivalent scores for reading, mathematics, and language were gathered from the student files for each year, kindergarten through seventh grade. The kindergarten score became the base score with the first grade scores being tested for significance at the .05 level by means of a two-tailed t-test. The first grade scores then became the new base with scores from the second grade being tested and so forth. This repeated measures design was continued through the seventh grade level. Statistical tests were conducted on the scores achieved by girls as a group, boys as a group, and the class as a whole. These levels of significance were then compared to the teaching method, as determined by the TAI, preferred by the teacher of each grade.
Both the CAT Form E and the SAT Eighth Edition were given to Loneman students during the 1988-1989 and 1989- 1990 school years. A Pearson Product-Moment correlation was calculated from the results obtained from the two tests in order to ascertain score reliability between the different subtests and the basic battery.
© 1997, Alvin Birkholz
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