Optimism in the Classroom
Hey all,
Hope you had a great week.
G’day all,
Welcome back. This week we will continue to look at Learned Optimism. Last week we look at optimism at work. This week we’ll look at optimism in the classroom.
Evidence
Primary School
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The Princeton-Penn Longitudinal Study examined 400 hundred third-grade children and followed them for 5 years. It was hypothesized that there would be two major risk factors for poor achievement and depression among children:
1. Pessimistic explanatory style
2. Bad life events
University
Optimism also seemed to predict if student’s would do better than expected while pessimism seemed to predict if a student would do worse than expected.
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Theory
Explanatory Style
Seligman argues that children with a pessimistic explanatory style are at a serious disadvantage.
How does a kid’s explanatory style affect their classroom performance?
Well if child fails at something, they can feel depressed (even for a short while). In this state of depression means that we a slow to react and are not likely to persist. Optimists tend to recover from this short-lived depression immediately. However, pessimists tend to wallow in it.
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Kids who were pessimistic and not depressed were found to get depressed over time.
Kids who were pessimistic and depressed were found to stay depressed.
Kids who were optimistic and depressed got better.
Kids for were optimistic and not depressed stayed depression-free.
But does pessimism cause depression or does depression cause pessimism?
Seligman argues that both are true and the result is a vicious cycle.
Bad Life Events
Additionally, the more bad life events that occur the worse the depression. These sounds obvious but may be overlooked.
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Conclusion
Optimism and pessimism seem to play a large role in the classroom from primary school through to university.
Interestingly, it also seems that our explanatory style predicts that of our children.
Stay tuned and we’ll see what else is affected by our explanatory style.
Enjoy your week.
