HOW AND WHY STUDENT SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS MATTERS FOR DEMONSTRATING KNOWLEDGE AND DECODING INSTRUCTIONS
It was late morning in Mrs. Miller’s class, and students were working on writing assignments. I positioned myself at the table of Tyrone (lower middle SES black boy), Sergio (higher SES white Hispanic boy), and Maricella (lower SES non-white Hispanic girl). The students had been talking and laughing together as they wrote their “small moment” stories. On this particular September day, students in Mrs. Miller’s class were trying to figure out my role, so the students at the table asked me why I was in their classroom. I told them I was watching them learn. Within a few seconds, Maricella then tells me that they (the students) are supposed to “respect property, respect others, respect yourself…That’s what Mrs. Miller does.” Maricella’s perception of Mrs. Miller telling the students to follow this school motto is correct; the students are regularly reminded to follow the “Foxcroft Way” in Mrs. Miller’s and others’ classrooms. After another 10 minutes of watching the students, Maricella turned to me as she reached for another blank sheet of paper. She shares that “if you put one finger in the air it means be quiet, if you put two fingers in the air, it means you have to go to the bathroom, and if you put three fingers in the air, it means you need to get water.”
Over the course of about 15 minutes watching this table, Maricella twice did
something that many of the lower SES students regularly did when they communicated with me, the teacher, and their peers: she demonstrated her knowledge of classroom rules and procedure.
This chapter explores one aspect of how students do school, specifically what they learn and how they demonstrate that knowledge. Regardless of racial background, less affluent students seem to learn the rules of the classroom better than they learn academic skills. They also tend to demonstrate their knowledge of classroom procedure regularly, as Maricella had done on that September morning. As will be shown below, though, more affluent students were better able to demonstrate academic knowledge in spite of how explicit or detailed teachers’ academic instructions were. These patterns seem to be connected to the fact that (1) teachers give less explicit and continuous instruction for academic tasks than for procedural rules and behavior and (2) more affluent students often had prior knowledge, experience, or parent coaching they could draw upon to complete their academic tasks. I argue that this has important implications for group differences in
achievement. Lower SES students are less likely to begin school equipped with the reading and other academic skills of their more affluent peers. To the degree that higher-SES students seem to understand their teachers’ inexplicit instructions, teachers may continue to assume that “typical” first graders should be able to execute the tasks as they present them. This leaves lower-SES students, who have less outside-of-school experience to draw upon, to flounder or improve at much slower rates, leaving them overall more negatively impacted by a lack of clear and detailed academic instruction.
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Every morning in Mrs. Miller’s class, students work on a math problem that is projected onto the Smart Board. She calls this activity “math talk,” and it is meant to allow students time to practice the math lessons from the week. Mrs. Miller rarely, if ever, directs students’ attention to the math problem, does not read it to them, or explain how to do it. She
simply leaves it on the screen for the students to try and solve on their own or in groups before they officially begin the day. Later in the afternoon, Mrs. Miller goes over these math problems with the whole class so the students can understand how to solve it.
I arrived in Mrs. Miller’s class one afternoon just as students were settling into their tables. Mrs. Miller pulled up the main screen on the Smart Board. There are three dots on the screen and the following text: “I see [three dots]. The answer is 9. How many are hidden? __ +___=___ & ___-___=___.”
For students to be able to solve this problem, they would have to first, be able to read all the words in the problem, and second, be familiar enough with the language of the
problem to understand what Mrs. Miller was asking. I deduced that the “answer” Mrs. Miller was referring to in the problem must have been the number after the equals sign, but a student could be fairly confused about what the “answer” to the question was since they already read that the “answer” was 9. Students would also need to understand that the 3 and the 9 in the word problem must be related to the blank spaces in the equations and that by virtue of making those spaces blank, Mrs. Miller was asking the students to fill in the missing numbers.
Mrs. Miller first called on Travis, a higher SES white boy who had been raising his hand, to answer the question. He correctly responds “6.” Mrs. Miller asks how Travis knew the answer. He tells her, “once I knew that 6 plus 3 equals 9, so I switched it to 3 plus 6.” Mrs. Miller asks more students how they figured out the answer, and Preston, another white higher SES boy, volunteered to show the class how he solved the problem. Preston came up to the Smart Board and drew nine circles side by side. He drew a line between third and
fourth circles, and explained that he counted after the third line and got six. This is a strategy the students had learned for solving similar problems similar six weeks earlier in class.
Mrs. Miller continued with her explanation, “The point of this is that 3 and 9 were in the equation already. My mystery number is 6. Some of you might want to write it like this.” She draws three boxes on the board, one with a 9 in it, one with a 3, and one with a “?” in it. The boxes are positioned like a triangle, lines connecting each box. This must have been another strategy Mrs. Miller had recently taught the students for solving math problems like these, though from this demonstration, it is unclear how it is any more effective at leading students to the answer than Travis and Preston’s suggestions. Mrs. Miller then asks who can reverse the equation. She calls on Olivia, a white higher-SES girl who had been raising her hand. Olivia quickly writes 9-3=6 on the board. Neither Olivia nor Mrs. Miller offer commentary, visual clarification, or explanation for why this equation would be the correct answer to the problem.
Mrs. Miller then told the students that she was going to give them another sheet of paper with another mystery number problem on it so they could practice further. She told the students that the answer was “just like” the problem they had been doing on the board. “You’re going to have the same thing,” Mrs. Miller says, “a plus, which means add, and a minus, which means subtract. Work with your table mates, get the counters if you need them.” She shows the paper on the Smart Board. It looks something like this:
Like the original math talk problem, Mrs. Miller offers very little instruction. She does not read the problem to the students, does not explain how or why to use “counters” for solving it, nor even refer back to some of the other strategies students had previously used. Her instructions are vague and seem to not clearly connect to the text of the word problem itself. In short, students’ success in solving this problem hinges on their ability to decode Mrs. Miller’s inexplicit instructions for this activity.
My attention is pulled away to Maricella, a lower SES Hispanic girl, for the entire five minutes that the students are allotted to solve this problem. Maricella cannot read any of the directions or the questions that she is supposed to be solving. The first thing she asks me is what the “____” spaces mean on the worksheet. I tell her that I think those spaces are where she is supposed to write her answer, though this was not clear in Mrs. Miller’s
total counters are there?” I have her sound it out because I want to remain consistent with the help strategies that teachers employ—asking students to try as much as they can on their own before telling them directly what to do. However, asking Maricella to sound out the words for herself takes a painstakingly long time, and it does not seem to help her arrive at the pronunciation of the word, so I end up telling her what it is. We repeat the same process with the word “total,” for which Maricella not only needs the pronunciation, but also the
definition. Eventually I read the whole question for her, because we have spent almost half the time just trying to sound out a few words, let alone the remaining words in the problem or the content of the question.
Once she understands what the question is asking, I ask her if she knows the answer. She does not. I figured that I could start to lead her to the answer by trying to get her to see that the word “total” appears in another place on the worksheet. I ask Maricella if she sees the word “total” anywhere else on the paper, and she says she does not (despite the large, bold “9 Total Counters” right above the question.) So, I ask if she sees the word in different parts of the paper, starting with the upper left corner and making my way to the part of the page that actually does say the word “total.” Again, Maricella does not see that the “total” in the question is the same word as the “total” in the “given” equation information. However, she seems to come up with the idea that 6 is the correct answer for the question (which is not correct, as the answer is 9), and moves on to the next one. Perhaps she remembered that Mrs. Miller had said the new question would be “just like” the first one, and since the answer to the first one was 6, she incorrectly deduced that the answer to this one was also 6. However, we are running out of time to do the worksheet, so instead of belaboring my strategy, I see what she tries next. Again, she struggles with the words in the next question, which is “How
many counters do you see?” Knowing that it is going to take a long time for her to figure out this question as well, I read the question for her and again ask if she sees the word “see” anywhere else on the paper. She does not, so I point out that the word “see” is in the upper left corner, where the four dots are illustrated.
At this point, Mrs. Miller switches off the lights and tells the students that they should have had “more than enough time to finish.” Indeed, as I glance around the room at some of the other students’ papers, I can see that several have correctly answered the problem and used number lines (similar to what Preston had demonstrated earlier) to show how they arrived at the answer 4+5=9, five being the mystery number for which they needed to solve.
This story demonstrates several common themes that I found while observing the three first grade classrooms. First, teachers can be fairly inexplicit with their academic instructions. We saw this in Mrs. Miller’s introduction of the problem, where without any extra instruction, she relied on students to be able to interpret for themselves what the math problem was and how to solve it. Even after she had gone over the correct answer with the whole class, the process for solving the problem remained inexplicit enough that students’ ability to replicate the process required accurate decoding of Mrs. Miller’s (and their peers’) instructions.
Second, it became clear that some students were able to figure out exactly what Mrs. Miller was asking in the math problem, even without explicit instruction from the teacher. Further, they were able to explain or demonstrate how they came up with the answer. The students who were most adept at this were mostly of higher socioeconomic status. However, when I observed Maricella, a lower-SES student, try to solve the similar problem, it became clear that she had not decoded the process as the more affluent students had. Maricella’s
lower reading ability meant that she had a hard time understanding what the words in the problem were, let alone how those words formed a question that she was supposed to solve. Even with my help reading the problem, though, Maricella still seemed unable to decode Mrs. Miller’s inexplicit instruction for how to solve it. This was surprising to me because I knew Maricella was good at math. In February of that year, Maricella was placed in the second-highest math ability group.8 There was no reason Maricella should have
misunderstood the problem, but without clear, explicit guidance from the teacher, Maricella faltered. In short, she struggled to decode her teacher’s academic instructions and, without the prior knowledge to draw on, was not able to demonstrate academic knowledge.
The findings in this chapter draw from my year-long ethnography of first grade classrooms at Foxcroft and Cumberland Elementary, as well as interviews with teachers, students, and their parents.9 It first describes the nature of different teacher expectations, starting with those pertaining to classroom rules. I then describe lower-SES students’ propensity for demonstrating their procedural knowledge, connecting this propensity in part to the explicit nature of teachers’ procedural instructions. I next outline the nature of
teachers’ academic instructions as well as higher-SES students’ propensity for decoding those instructions and demonstrating academic knowledge. Finally, I describe socioeconomic differences in parent coaching that may explain how and why students demonstrate different
8 Starting in October, there were five math and reading ability groups that students were placed in. These ability groups met the last 30 minutes of the day for targeted activities and interventions at their academic level. Students were placed in their groups on the basis of standardized reading tests that the entire state of North Carolina uses for elementary grades. At the beginning of the year, math groups were placed on the basis of tests created by the teachers at Foxcroft, and later in the year, Common Core math assessments provided teachers with data to group students by ability. Tests were given to students somewhat regularly throughout the year (every few months), and when needed, students changed groups as well. 9 For more information on methods, Foxcroft, and Cumberland Elementary, see Chapter 3.
kinds of knowledge and skill in the classroom. I argue that the kind of knowledge that students demonstrate are different and previously unidentified forms of cultural capital that, like other researchers have found, are connected primarily to SES, are learned from parents, and are differentially rewarded by teachers.
Classroom Behavior and Following Rules—Explicit Instructions
At both Foxcroft and Cumberland Elementary, the teachers I observed cared about their students and wanted to be good teachers. As many experts (Gracey 1972; Garrett 2014) and anyone who has managed a large group of young people know, communicating
instructions about how to be a safe, respectful, and structured classroom community is a key to effective classroom management. Learning how to become an appropriate classroom citizen is a fundamental lesson that students learn through the “hidden curriculum” of kindergarten and other early educational experiences (Gracey 1972). Like the first grade teachers at Foxcroft and Cumberland, teachers everywhere create rules for who can speak and how to signal desire for speaking to promote order and respect for others; additionally, by leading student activities and schedules, teachers establish themselves as authority figures who ought to be obeyed and paid attention to (Gracey 1972).
Teachers at Foxcroft and Cumberland therefore had certain behavioral expectations for their students, which they communicated fairly often, and in explicit terms. Teachers instructed students to listen when others (particularly the teacher, but also their classmates) were talking. They instructed students to walk quietly and slowly in the hallways. They also instructed students to use particular sets of signals to communicate to the teacher their needs or knowledge of classroom procedure. For example, at Cumberland, when Ms. Jennifer wanted the students to be quiet and actively demonstrate to her that they knew what to do,
students would raise two fingers in the air and put their index finger from their other hand over their lips. They called this signal “peace and quiet” and used it frequently when quieting themselves to await instructions from Ms. Jennifer. At Foxcroft, they used a similar set of signals for students to communicate their needs or understanding of behavior expectations. At Foxcroft, one finger in the air signaled that students knew to be quiet in the same way that “peace and quiet” did at Cumberland. Two fingers in the air signaled to the teacher that the student needed to go to the bathroom, and three fingers in the air signaled that the student wanted to get a drink of water (as Maricella had reminded me about in the first anecdote of this chapter).
Teachers were most explicit about these behavioral rules because they talked about classroom rules frequently, particularly at the beginning of the year. Teachers mentioned spending several weeks—from three to six full weeks, depending on the teacher—working to get students to understand and internalize these classroom rules. Teachers took this part of the year so seriously that I actually could not gain access to any classroom at Foxcroft or Cumberland until after the teachers felt comfortable that the students understood classroom rules and procedures.
In addition to spending time at the beginning of the year discussing these rules with the students, teachers emphasize classroom rules every day in some manner. Mrs. Miller, for example, constructed with the students a “your job, my job” chart, which was a list of student jobs and her job as the teacher. This list, which included things like “listen, follow directions,