Pajares, Frank and Urdan, Tim. (Eds.), (2004). Educating
Adolescents: Challenges and Strategies. Charlotte, NC:
Information Age Publishing, Inc.
Pp. xi + 295
$65.95 (hardcover) ISBN 1-59311-154-1
$34.95 (papercover) ISBN 1-59311-153-3
Reviewed by Jennifer Wen-Shya Lee
University of Calgary
November 1, 2006
This volume brings together contributions from various
perspectives with respect to the challenges facing adolescents
and their teachers and strategies that have been adopted in the
school setting to address these challenges. This American-focused
book is a helpful resource for educators and those who are concerned
with young people’s intellectual and psychological
development in the United States. First, it describes the
psychological and contextual problems that adolescents often
experience, yet are under-represented within academic literature
such as depression, harassment, sexual experiences, and weapon
use. Second, a situated and ecological point of view on adolescent
development is taken to discuss issues related to adolescents and
education, which is critical to the consideration of how adolescents’
broader social contexts influence their well-being and academic
learning. Third, several chapters of this book provide
suggestions regarding how the school can deal with the challenges of
academic learning, well-being and identity development among
adolescents.
The editors have divided the eleven chapters of this book into
three sections. The first five chapters present the psychological
and contextual problems that young people often experience.
Chapters Six to Nine discuss cultural and contextual
factors that influence adolescents’ academic experiences.
The last two chapters focus on issues related to youth identity
development.
Daniel Flannery and Kelly Wester discuss risk factors
associated with academic achievement among youth in middle and
high school at the individual, family, and school levels.
Flannery and Wester examine the following risk factors related to
academic achievement in adolescence: (1) delinquent behavior,
substance use, and truancy and dropout at the individual level;
(2) socio- economic factors, parental involvement, and parenting
styles at the family level; and (3) exposure to violence, school
climate, school size and resources, and teacher-student
relationships at the school level.
Most interestingly, Flannery
and Wester discuss briefly two contrasting aspects of school
climate on student behavior and achievement. Negative school
climate, termed “systematic violence” includes (1)
“exclusionary practices that eliminate the ability for
specific students to engage or participate in various school
activities, clubs, or organizations” ; (2) the tolerance
of abuse when bullying, threats, or violence occur; (3)
school’s disciplinary policies rooted in principles of
exclusion and punishment.
To achieve a positive school
climate, five elements are needed: (1) a safe environment in
which students and teachers can focus on academic and social
skills development; (2) a sequenced and supported curriculum that
demands a high level of mastery from all students;
(3) a
commitment from the school administration to conduct on-going
assessments of the school goals and mission; (4) the elimination
of school practices that assume that many students cannot and
will not academically succeed; and (5) the affirmation and
celebration of achievement for enhancing commitment to student
academic progress and to the school mission. Flannery and
Wester’s chapter provides a broad overview of a variety of
risk and protective factors and thus sets out a framework for
some of the risk factors that are reviewed in greater detail in
other chapters.
The following four chapters deal with common psychological and
contextual problems throughout adolescence. Karen Rudolph
examines adolescent depression as both an antecedent and a
consequence of academic difficulties in terms of a transactional
model of school adjustment and depression, which emphasizes
self-regulatory processes as links between depression and school
adjustment. She concludes that depression during early adolescence
predicts future self-regulatory difficulties (e.g., maladaptive
achievement-related beliefs, disengagement, and negative
evaluations of the school environment) and these difficulties, in
turn, place adolescents at risk for future depression.
Rudolph’s chapter examines the ecological
context to present how trajectories of depression and school
adjustment difficulties fuel each other in a mutually reinforcing
cycle in adolescence. Moreover, it suggests several directions
for school-based interventions and educational reform such as the
identification of adolescents at risk in the school context, the
development of resources for effective self-regulation, and
better integration of mental health services into school
settings.
Nancy Kellogg’s chapter begins with an overview
of research on abusive, wanted, and illegal sexual experiences in
adolescence. Next, she describes barriers to disclosure of sexual
abuse and provides a practical guideline for detecting such
abuse. Given the close and complex relationships between
adolescent sexual experiences and experiences within the home and
among peers, Kellogg offers several strategies for preventing
sexual abuse, which focus on the school's role in the
prevention, detection, reporting, and treatment of unwanted,
coercive, illegal, or abusive sexual experiences that may occur
during adolescence. Sandra Graham and her colleagues conducted a
study to examine the relationship between peer harassment and
ethnic identity from an attributional perspective. This study
systematically documented the hypothesis that particular kinds of
causal attributions for peer harassment might be related to
particular adjustment consequences. In Chapter Four of this book,
Graham presents empirical findings to show an association between
ethnic majority status in a school and the consequences of being
harassed by peers and thus suggests that ethnic diversity has
psychological benefits for coping with peer harassment at both the
individual and classroom level. This chapter offers new ways to
think about ethnicity in context, ethnic diversity, and coping
with peer harassment during adolescence. Chapter Five discusses
adolescents’ exposure to a variety of weapons on school
grounds in Israel and the United States. Ron Astor, Rami
Benbenishty, Heather A. Meyer, and Michelle Elena Rosamond review
some major concepts regarding weapon carrying in schools and then
explore the relationships between victimization and weapon use on
school grounds based on a case study in Israeli schools. This
chapter demonstrates that there are many ways weapons on school
grounds can victimize students and each type of victimization can
produce different outcomes in students’ behavior both in
the United States and cross-culturally.
The next four chapters focus on adolescent students’
academic experiences in terms of a person-in-context approach. In
Chapter Six, Gerald Bracey looks at American adolescents’
academic achievement by comparing the major outcomes of
several international assessments. They include: (1) How in the
World Do Students Read?, (2) the Third International Mathematics
and Science Study (TIMSS-95), (3) the Third International
Mathematics and Science Study— Repeat (TIMSS-99), (4) the
Program of International Student Assessment (PISA), and (5) the
Progress in Reading Literacy Study. He also raises questions
about the validity of cross-national comparisons and the ways in which
media portray the results of such assessments. Next, Tim Urdan
and Deborah Garvey describe the educational enrollment and
attainment profiles of first-, second-, and third-generation
adolescent students in the United States based on a combination
of nationally representative data and California-specific data.
Moreover, they examine motivational and achievement differences
across these generational groups by using a smaller sample of
students from three California high schools. Urdan and Garvey
point out that factors influencing youth motivation and achievement
vary across generational groups, including facility with the
English language and connection to the mainstream cultural
beliefs and values of immigrants. However, the authors identify
second and third generation according to the mother’s place
of birth only, which may make the grouping problematic for
comparisons across studies. Chapter Eight discusses the
school-within-school model (SWS) for U.S. high schools from
three sources of evidence. They include empirical research about
the organization and structure of U.S. high schools, several
studies focusing on school size, and a 3-year qualitative study
on 5 SWS high schools. In their 3-year study, Valerie Lee and
Douglas Ready examine critically the operation of SWS high
schools and the stability of the SWS reform among five of these
schools. They conclude that the SWS structure may offer solutions
to the problems that plague large comprehensive high schools, but
schools should avoid its potential to segregate and stratify. In
Chapter Nine, Donna Eder and Janice McCabe consider the more
intimate context of peers and friends for adolescents’
school experiences. They discuss how to bridge
adolescents’ social and academic identities by examining
the impact of various school structures and practices on the
development of social and academic identities among young people
as well as describe a wide range of alternative in this
regard.
The last section of this book includes two chapters examining
adolescents’ identity development in general and religious
identity in particular. Gerald Adams and Susan Palijan present the notion of an
identity-education link; they describe
six ways
that the educational environment can influence adolescents’
identity development. The six themes consist of ego identity,
ethnic identity, community service, extracurricular/leisure
activities, religion, and school and academic climate. They
suggest that specific aspects of educational experiences can
influence both identity and well-being among adolescent students.
Geoffrey Ream and Ritch Savin-Williams examine the influences of
religious involvement and spiritual commitment on adolescent
behavior and health. They also discuss the impact of religion
within contexts broader than schools such as issues related to
race and ethnicity, religious organizations as youth-serving
institutions, constructive cooperation between faith-based and
secular youth work, and political conflict between religious
organizations and schools. They argue that voluntary religious
involvement is generally a positive influence on
adolescents’ lives, but also note that what is beneficial
to one may not be helpful for another because adolescents follow
various developmental paths regarding their religious
development.
The key to this book is not only that it provides objective and
succinct explanations of the difficulties some adolescents may
experience, but also that it introduces practical interventions in
dealing with these difficulties. Young people today encounter
more life challenges than previous generations, yet they are
provided less guidance and intervention for their personal
development. They are required to have more knowledge and skills
so as to compete in the global market place. There are fewer
entry-level jobs in postindustrial societies for those with
little formal education. Moreover, they have to cope with new
cultural and social phenomena emerging from globalization and
integrate these into their overall worldview. Thus, the need to
understand the challenges in the education of adolescents and the
to provide appropriate programs and interventions in school
settings is pressing. This book meets those needs.
I have, however, two concerns about the whole project of the
book. Firstly, this book lacks the presentation of research
activities and education programs with respect to
social-emotional learning in adolescence; for example, brain
functioning and methods of learning and instruction to identify
the skills that provide adolescent students with broad guidance
and direction for their actions in all aspects of their lives, in
and out of school. Generally speaking, modern education has
several purposes: to prepare students to become citizens and
engage in service; to prepare students with knowledge, skills,
and character to enter the world of work; and to help
students’ develop a sense of well-being. The majority of
investigations and discussion of challenges and strategies for
educating adolescents in this volume emphasize students’
academic achievement, which is mostly based on standardized
assessment. The exclusive attention to academic learning in this
book leads to an absence of attention to social-emotional learning.
Social-emotional learning, a critical aspect of ‘education
of the whole child’, refers to character education,
service learning, citizenship education, and emotional
intelligence (Elias, 2006). Indeed, we need to take a
comprehensive view of the health and development of adolescents
if they are to reach their full potential.
Secondly, the project of this book is insufficient for
illuminating the role of personal agency in adolescent
development. Given the
dominance of positivism and a conventional view of adolescent
students as essentially passive,
this book contributes little to
the debate about the interplay of structure and agency
between sociologists and psychologists. The question becomes to
what extent individuals exercise control independent of social
structure (finding oneself) versus to what extent external
social, political, economic, and cultural forces determine
individual behavior (social-institutional processes). Many
chapters of this book provide empirical evidence for the
influence of family, school, and society on adolescents’
behavior and academic learning.
However, few chapters, if any,
demonstrate the impact of personal agency; for example, how
adolescents’ own cognitive structures or affective
predispositions influence their academic learning and problematic
behavior.
How young people construct the reality of
schooling and develop their ego strength, personal identity, and
social identity within social-institutional processes are not
readily revealed in quantitative research.
In summary, this book offers a broad overview of challenging
issues and strategies for educating adolescent students in the
United States. The articles are firmly supported by research
findings from large-scale surveys and assessments, which provide
interested audiences objective evidence to understand general
phenomena with respect to adolescent development within a
post-industrial and multicultural context. Most importantly, it
is readable even for those who are not familiar with statistical
methods.
Reference
Elias, M. J. (2006). The connection between academic and
social-emotional learning. In M. J. Elias & H. Arnold (Eds.),
The educator’s guide to emotional intelligence and
academic achievement: Social-emotional learning in the
classroom (pp. 4-14). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
About the Reviewer
Jennifer Wen-Shya Lee, The Faculty of Education, University of
Calgary, Canada,
received her PhD degree from the Graduate Division of
Educational Research at University of Calgary in June 2006. She
has been awarded the post-doctoral fellowship 2006-07 from the
Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange
for conducting a study, entitled “Chinese Canadians’
Political and Community Participation in Calgary and Vancouver:
Sense of Self and Community.” She has fifteen years of
secondary teaching experience, consisting of ten years of junior
and senior high schools in Taipei, Taiwan as a social studies
teacher and five years at a Saturday Chinese school in Calgary,
Canada. Her current research interests include citizenship,
democratic education, multicultural education, comparative
education, adolescent development, identity formation,
immigration and diversity, and globalization.
Copyright is retained by the first or sole author,
who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.
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