Adolescent Academic Avoidance

Teaching was explained to me as an art form and a mystery. It draws to the fact that the student is a blank canvas waiting to be transformed into a painting; yet the mystery is the artist does not have complete control of how the canvas will transform the paint. Each canvas will take the colors applied by the artist and may change it just a slight shade, or the canvas could be completely resistant to all paints thus remaining blank. It is this blank canvas or resistant student that keeps teachers up at night wondering, “How can I get through to this student?” Is it the pedagogy, or is it that the student has had years of practice of creating academic avoidance strategies? Or more importantly is there a correlation between the two? This is the question that a recent article in The Journal of Educational Psychology entitled “The Classroom Environment and Students’ Reports of Avoidance Strategies in Mathematics: A Multimethod Study.”
The researchers observed 1,197 s...