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The psychologist nurturing students’ positive development

20 August 2024

Interview Learning & Education Society Technology Diversity Education technology Teaching methods Technology and society Learning variability

Lisa Bardach is exploring ways to promote motivation and learning

Image by Claudia Flandoli for BOLD

Lisa Bardach is a psychology researcher at the University of Giessen in Germany. Lisa studies positive development in children and adolescents at school, focusing on motivation, personality, self-regulation, and learning. She is also looking at how schools approach cultural diversity, and how to harness technology to help all children thrive. Annie Brookman-Byrne talks with Lisa about the best approaches to cultural diversity, the importance of avoiding media hype, and the promise of educational technology.

Annie Brookman-Byrne: What questions are you asking about learning, and how are you investigating them?

Lisa Bardach: Young people are growing up in increasingly culturally diverse and often unequal societies. How do schools and other settings deal with cultural diversity, and how can they address social inequities? At the individual level, what are the roles of motivation, personality, self-regulation, and cognitive abilities in development and learning? And how can digital technologies support positive development at school?

I’m answering these questions using a variety of tools, including surveys of school staff, virtual reality experiments, research syntheses, eye tracking, social-network data, and digital traces of learning on educational apps.

Learning is key to human development and thriving. All children and adolescents should be given the chance to benefit from high-quality education so that they can reach their full potential and lead self-determined, successful, and socially responsible lives while contributing to society. I hope my research will lead to recommendations for educational practice that will help achieve this goal.

“How do schools and other settings deal with cultural diversity, and how can they address social inequities?”

ABB: What have you discovered so far about cultural diversity in school settings?

LB: To give just one recent example, in a meta-analysis, I looked at the ways schools approach cultural diversity. If schools emphasize the equal status of students from different ethnic, racial, and cultural groups, for example, this can have a positive impact on intergroup relations. If they explicitly recognize cultural diversity as a resource to be leveraged in the classroom, students tend to be better adjusted socioemotionally. And if they encourage discussions about social inequity and the stigmatization faced by certain groups in society, students may feel encouraged to redress inequities, and we also found that students may benefit in terms of higher motivation and academic achievement.

I am excited about this work and its potential implications for practice. Cultural diversity, like other types of diversity, is often ignored in schools. This may be in part because teachers are uncomfortable addressing these issues. They need support and training in ways to approach cultural diversity.

ABB: What do these different approaches for addressing cultural diversity look like in school? Are some more effective than others?

Teachers can make it clear that students from different ethnic, racial, and cultural groups deserve equal respect at school, and they can treat all students fairly, irrespective of their backgrounds. Also, they can encourage students from different ethnic, racial, and cultural groups to work together to reach common goals, and emphasize the importance of positive intergroup contact. This may be the easiest approach to implement, and it yields the strongest positive effects.

Another approach is to value cultural variations and give students the opportunity to learn about different cultures, which creates a climate of multiculturalism. Still another is to actively discuss and reflect upon social inequity in the classroom. These last two approaches require teachers to have more experience and background knowledge, for example about the histories of various cultural groups. Without that knowledge, the danger is that these approaches will either not be implemented or be implemented superficially, limiting their effectiveness.

“Teachers can make it clear that students from different ethnic, racial, and cultural groups deserve equal respect at school.”

If, on the other hand, cultural diversity is ignored in favour of creating a ‘colour-blind climate’, students from ethnic, racial, and cultural minority groups likely feel excluded and may do worse academically.

These are just some examples of the many ways in which schools can approach cultural diversity. These approaches do not necessarily exist in isolation from one another – a school may incorporate parts of multiple approaches. Combining different beneficial approaches is likely to achieve the best outcomes.

ABB: What are some of the challenges of research into students’ positive development?

LB: Many people believe that this research can provide quick and easy fixes for big challenges. As researchers, we focus on our own – often narrow – topics of investigation, and it is tempting to believe that one particular area holds the key to improving learning and development. We need to be careful to avoid contributing to the media hype that occurs when one idea receives a lot of public attention. A particular feature of learners or the environment may be touted as an area that can be easily fixed, but the situation is likely to be more complex than that.

There are no easy solutions, and researchers like me can and should do better. For example, we can take into account multiple characteristics and contexts by collaborating with scholars in other disciplines. This will expand our horizons beyond the theories and methods of our own disciplines, and keep us from losing sight of the complexity of the real world.

ABB: What is your view of digital technology? Does it have the potential to make a big difference in learning and development?

LB: Technologies hold great promise when it comes to promoting student learning and positive development. They also provide great opportunities for researchers by capturing rich data for analysis. However, children and teachers often lack the support they need to develop digital skills.

“Teacher support is a critical factor in determining whether students remain engaged with digital learning software.”

My colleagues and I have shown that teacher support is a critical factor in determining whether students remain engaged with digital learning software. This means that students still need real teachers to support them as they pursue digital learning. In addition, digital tools for educational purposes are not necessarily based on the best empirical evidence. Many challenges – and opportunities – for research and practice lie ahead.