An ACE Grad's Research Offers Hope for Student Resilience, Wins Honors
David Yeager, Professor of Psychology, Receiving Awards from AERA
David Yeager, who served Catholic schools in Tulsa as an ACE 11 teacher and is now an Assistant Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, continues to receive scholarly recognition for his recent research on subjects at the heart of education, such as a teacher's ability to nurture resilient mindsets in students.
His soon-to-be-published article, co-authored with Carol Dweck of Stanford and Kali Trzesniewski of UC Davis in the journal Child Development, asked this question: What helps adolescents to cope positively with bullying or exclusion? Yeager's research finds that giving adolescents a simple message that people have the potential to change for the better—even if they seem to be fixed "bullies" or "jerks" who will never change—could dramatically reduce real-world aggression among low-income, urban high school students.
Such a finding "was especially important because this is an age group typically thought of as impervious to change," says Yeager. His intervention provides new hope for positive efforts in this area. The study is being honored with the 2012 Outstanding Dissertation Award by Division E of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
His soon-to-be-published article, co-authored with Carol Dweck of Stanford and Kali Trzesniewski of UC Davis in the journal Child Development, asked this question: What helps adolescents to cope positively with bullying or exclusion? Yeager's research finds that giving adolescents a simple message that people have the potential to change for the better—even if they seem to be fixed "bullies" or "jerks" who will never change—could dramatically reduce real-world aggression among low-income, urban high school students.
Such a finding "was especially important because this is an age group typically thought of as impervious to change," says Yeager. His intervention provides new hope for positive efforts in this area. The study is being honored with the 2012 Outstanding Dissertation Award by Division E of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
The AERA will convene its annual meeting in Vancouver, Canada, on April 13.
Other research by Yeager addresses the topic of how to change the mindsets of racial minority students and, by doing so, substantially decrease achievement gaps over time. With his co-author Gregory Walton, Yeager explains that even brief psychological interventions—lasting 15 minutes or one hour—could reduce the gaps between black and white students by up to 50% for two or three years following the intervention.
An article summarizing this research, titled "Social-psychological interventions in education: They're not magic," was published in the premier AERA journal, Review of Educational Research. It has been widely read, and it will receive the AERA 2012 Review of Research Award, given to the most outstanding review paper written across all sub-areas in Education. It will also receive the AERA Division E Outstanding Research Award, for the most outstanding piece of research in human development.
"Combined, this research suggests that seemingly intractable problems facing students in urban schools, including violent aggression and academic under-achievement, can be addressed by changing students' mindsets in more of a positive direction," says Yeager.
A next step for Yeager's research will be to continue to understand how teachers can be trained in these methods and how they can be used to address educational problems at scale.
Yeager, who taught in Tulsa in 2004-2006 while earning an M.Ed. degree through ACE, went on to earn his Ph.D. in developmental and psychological science from the School of Education at Stanford. As noted in ACE's 2010-2011 Annual Report, Yeager says he is driven by a desire to support teachers in meeting their classroom challenges.
Stanford provides more details about his bullying research. A Harvard Graduate School of Education blog offers comments on his achievement gap research.
Other research by Yeager addresses the topic of how to change the mindsets of racial minority students and, by doing so, substantially decrease achievement gaps over time. With his co-author Gregory Walton, Yeager explains that even brief psychological interventions—lasting 15 minutes or one hour—could reduce the gaps between black and white students by up to 50% for two or three years following the intervention.
An article summarizing this research, titled "Social-psychological interventions in education: They're not magic," was published in the premier AERA journal, Review of Educational Research. It has been widely read, and it will receive the AERA 2012 Review of Research Award, given to the most outstanding review paper written across all sub-areas in Education. It will also receive the AERA Division E Outstanding Research Award, for the most outstanding piece of research in human development.
"Combined, this research suggests that seemingly intractable problems facing students in urban schools, including violent aggression and academic under-achievement, can be addressed by changing students' mindsets in more of a positive direction," says Yeager.
A next step for Yeager's research will be to continue to understand how teachers can be trained in these methods and how they can be used to address educational problems at scale.
Yeager, who taught in Tulsa in 2004-2006 while earning an M.Ed. degree through ACE, went on to earn his Ph.D. in developmental and psychological science from the School of Education at Stanford. As noted in ACE's 2010-2011 Annual Report, Yeager says he is driven by a desire to support teachers in meeting their classroom challenges.
Stanford provides more details about his bullying research. A Harvard Graduate School of Education blog offers comments on his achievement gap research.