by Ihor Cap, Ph. D.
Adolescents and adults bring to the learning (change) situation varying levels of readiness, knowledge, personalities, skills, cultural beliefs and life experiences. Many public survey measures are used to help us understand the status behind these phenomena. We can learn even more about these phenomena when educational researchers can change the course of such phenomena. However, this type of approach requires experimental manipulation. Has there been a lot of experimental research conducted involving the race or ancestry variable with adolescents or adults and the use of control subjects (or statistical control)? What does the instructional designer or marketing manager need to know when planning for media interventions with adolescent or adult ethno-cultural or racial populations?
The findings and conclusions drawn from
these studies challenge our assumptions of learners and the processes of
learning or change as we consider, design or restructure our instructional and
motivational interventions to achieve the purposes intended, says Cap (2001, p.
2) in his research digest. The patterns
and trends in the studies coalesced to
form the following conclusions (Cap, 2001, pp.22-24):
-
Media technology can effect
instructional improvements in all three learning domains.
- Instructional improvements in
the cognitive domain do not always carry over to improvements
in the affective domain.
- The affective domain is more
problematic than the cognitive or psychomotor domains for effecting
improvements.
- Information (knowledge) gains
are often greater than attitude.
- Individuals’ who learn more
(new) information tend to make the larger gains in attitude
than individuals who learn less.
- In some instances, ethnic or
racial groups are not any more (or less) knowledgeable
about their own group(s) than groups not of the same ethnic or racial
backgrounds.
- Ethnic and racial minority
attitudes can be favorably affected by planned intellectual
and social contacts.
- Not all groups or sub-groups
will be evenly affected.
- An audience is much more
susceptible to persuasive messages if the treatment suggestions
target this audience for improvement.
- Given the opportunity for
active participation or choice in subsequent sequence selection during exposure
to the communication enhances the likelihood of low mental ability groups to
respond positively to the treatment suggestions.
- Given the opportunity, ethnic
and racial groups are more likely to be affected by their
own student social models with positive results.
- Given a context shared by both
the audience and communicator, same race audience
members empathize more with a recording comprising two different racial
actors versus a recording using same race actors.
- Racial groups treated to a message
by a non-same background presenter tend to retain
less information than groups treated to the same message by one of their own.
- The communicator race factor
tends to exercise less of an effect on individuals’ attitudes toward message
content than does close-mindedness.
- Females, in response to the
treatment suggestions, are more inclined to perform vocational
information-seeking behaviors than males.
- Females belonging to an ethnic
minority group, in response to the treatment suggestions, are less inclined to
perform vocational information-seeking behaviors than females as a group.
- Individual motives tend to
mirror group motivation.
- The superiority of such ethnic
variables as ancestry and religion in predicting postcourse
success is displaced when precourse performance scores are accounted for.
- It is not only the precourse
knowledge and attitudes of the learner that are important
to postcourse success, but it is also a matter of the subsequent preparation
of contents and activities to be in harmonious correspondence with these
characteristics.
- The use of preproduction
testing (formative evaluation) notably increases the probability
of postcourse success.
Education and marketing researchers,
trainers, coaches and mentors, professionals and experienced practitioners should
take heed of these conclusions to avoid any unnecessary negative
post-intervention aftereffects. Consult the digest of controlled research studies
to learn the details of these experiments. The patterns and trends evidenced here
attest to the value and importance of ethnicity and race as factors to contend
with when planning for any learning (or change) interventions with these
audiences.
Author: Ihor Cap, Ph.D.
Reading list
Cap, Ihor. (2001). The Effects of
Instructional Media and Ethnocultural Characteristics on Egalitarian and
Utilitarian Learning: An Empirical Digest of Controlled Research Studies. U.S. Department
of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Educational Resources Information Center
(ERIC). ED 457 856
Smith, F.T. (1943). An experiment in
modifying attitudes toward the Negro (Contributions to Education, No. 887).
New York:
Teachers College, Columbia
University.
First published October 26, 2008 in http://articlesandblogs.ezreklama.com.
