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Effects of Desegregation on Achievement-Relevant Motivation

  • Lois Biener
  • Harold B. Gerard
Chapter
Part of the Perspectives in Social Psychology book series (PSPS)

Abstract

In spite of public acceptance of the democratic ideals of school desegregation, many citizens have expressed serious reservations about bussing. The one advantage that could possibly outweigh the costs, in the eyes of some critics, would be a significant improvement in the academic performance of the desegregated minority children. As indicated in Chapter 1 underlying the expectation of such an improvement has been the belief that through interracial contact minority children will develop the motivations and values that are presumed to be the necessary mediators of academic achievement. Included in the battery of instruments administered to our sample children were several measures designed to assess achievement motivation. These measures were included in order to provide data for detecting if, in fact, a change in values occurred and further to examine the relationships between change in values and change in achievement. In the initial sections of this chapter we will review the framework of reasoning and research that bears on our notions about motivation and school achievement and that underlies the expectation that desegregation can have a beneficial impact on minority children. The latter sections will discuss the measures in some detail and present a summary of our findings.

Keywords

Black Child Achievement Motivation Achievement Score Minority Child School Desegregation 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Plenum Press, New York 1975

Authors and Affiliations

  • Lois Biener
    • 1
  • Harold B. Gerard
    • 2
  1. 1.University of MassachusettsBostonUSA
  2. 2.University of Southern CaliforniaLos AngelesUSA

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