School and academic interventions.

Intrinsic Motivation, Learning Goals, Engagement, and Achievement in a Diverse High School

“…As noted previously, there is a longstanding achievement gap among racial/ethnic groups in the United States, with European American and some Asian American groups having consistently higher achievement than African Americans, Latin@s, Native Americans, and some Asian groups (Aud, Fox, & KewalRamani, ; Worrell, , ). Several theoretical models positing interactions between cultural identities and achievement orientations have been put forward to explain this gap, with the most prominent of these being Steele's (, ; Steele & Aronson, ) stereotype threat and Ogbu's (, , ; Ogbu & Simons, ) cultural ecological theory.…”

“…Moreover, there is a growing body of research showing that social psychological interventions have a positive effect on the academic performance of racial/ethnic minority students (Yeager & Walton, 2011). The contention here is not that culture and context do not matter—indeed, they do (Worrell, ); rather, the claim is that other general psychological phenomena, such as motivation, are equally important in minority and majority populations and that many of the academic and behavioral interventions that have been developed will be useful with students, regardless of their racial/ethnic backgrounds (Frisby, ; Worrell, ). As Frisby () observed more than two decades ago, we need to be able to distinguish between when culture matters and when it does not.…”

“…Based on previous literature, we included gender, parental education, and previous academic achievement in the model, as we were interested in the contributions of the motivational constructs above and beyond the contributions of demographic variables and previous achievement. We also examined the model with only the African American students and with only the Latin@ students to see whether the relationships among the variables held for these two groups of diverse learners who are on the lower end of the achievement gap (Worrell, , ). To set the stage for this large study among diverse students, we briefly review the extant literature on the relationship of learning goals and engagement to academic achievement.…”

Teacher–student relationships, psychological need satisfaction, and happiness among diverse students

“…Chen et al () reported that psychological need satisfaction and happiness had roughly equivalent positive relationships in Belgium, China, the United States, and Peru, providing support for self‐determination theory's claim of universal psychological needs. However, Chen et al grouped diverse adolescents and college students from the United States together, thus losing the benefit of examining the differences and similarities within and among ethnic groups in the same country (Worrell, , ). In another study, Levesque, Zuehlke, Stanek, and Ryan () found that German and American college students experienced more psychological need satisfaction and happiness when their teachers created a lower sense of pressure.…”

“…All of these factors may contribute to the findings that European American students report significantly higher levels of happiness than Asian Americans, Latinos, and African Americans (e.g., Huebner, Valois, Paxton, & Drane, 2005;Lewis, Huebner, Malone, & Valois, 2011), and that, in some cases, African American students report lower levels of happiness than students from other racial and ethnic backgrounds (e.g., Andretta, Worrell, Mello, Dixson, & Baik, 2013;Ma & Huebner, 2008). Although self-determination theory suggests that the needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence are universal (Ryan & Deci, 2017), students of different ethnicities sometimes have psychological and educational responses that differ from predictions based upon universal theories (Worrell, 2014a(Worrell, , 2014b. Therefore, it is important to see whether teacher-student relationships, the satisfaction of psychological needs, and happiness have similar relationships among students of different ethnicities.…”