Effort Thought To Be The Key To Success In Some Homes, UF Study Finds

July 10, 1996

GAINESVILLE —Poor black mothers who do not have an advanced education are not deterred from encouraging their children to succeed in mathematics, a new University of Florida study finds.

“We would suspect these mothers would not be positive about education because they didn’t finish school,” said Ken Cyrus, who did the research for his doctoral dissertation in educational psychology. “But we find they give a very strong motivational lesson to their children by stressing the importance of effort because effort is something that can be controlled.”

Since many poor black children come from homes where the mother is the only parent, mothers’ attitudes about school are valuable to education, he said.

Cyrus believes the results of the study can help elementary mathematics teachers with disadvantaged black students in their classrooms. Teachers can incorporate into their lesson plans the message that effort is necessary for success, an idea consistent with the beliefs of students and their parents, he said.

“With all the recent discussion of welfare reform, succeeding in school will become imperative for these kids,” he said. “It’s going to be mandatory that they get more out of their studies in order to be able to compete in the outside world.”

For the study, Cyrus visited several Gainesville public housing areas and asked 100 children and their mothers to rate five qualities in the order they believed were necessary to succeed in mathematics. The children were all in the 6th, 7th or 8th grades. Using chips and cards, both groups selected effort as being more important than ability, luck, training at school and training at home.

In contrast, some studies have found middle-class white mothers and their children consider ability to be paramount to success in the field, he said.

“Black mothers’ attitude is that with a certain amount of effort, you can overcome anything,” Cyrus said. “What they’re really saying is , Don’t give up. With hard work you can achieve part of the American dream.’ Probably this belief in perseverance developed in response to the tremendous obstacles African Americans have faced, from slavery to sharecropping to modern-day adversities. And I think mothers are passing this on to their kids.”

The study did not examine why young blacks often do not perform better in school. But African American mothers’ beliefs about education certainly do not set their children back as some people might expect, he said.

Performing well in mathematics is increasingly important in today’s society with the advent of the Information Age, Cyrus said. Many lower-class blacks can no longer rely on the Agrarian and Industrial Age jobs they held in the past, he said.

Next, Cyrus said he hopes to study why many poor blacks today do not get as much out of education as they did in the past.

“Leaders like the 19th century educator Booker T. Washington believed in education, self-help and no welfare,” he said. “What happened to that ethic?”