How Family Background Affects Student Behavior and Academic Performance

Introduction: Home Life and Student Outcomes

There are distinct reasons why some students are not adversely affected — either in their behavior or in their academics — by situations involving poverty, divorce, and dysfunctional families. One of the most significant of these reasons has to do with the students themselves and their personality types. People have many different ways of encountering and, ideally, overcoming adversity. Students who are impoverished yet come from families with strong backgrounds for overcoming hardship may view their temporary circumstances as simply another obstacle to conquer. Many immigrants, especially those from disadvantaged parts of the world, may fit into this category. For these students, scholastic achievement becomes a means of rising above poverty, which may make them among the best behaved and most academically focused in their classrooms.

The Role of Personality and Family Values

The main thing that educators must consider when working with children from impoverished or broken homes is that the family values these children are raised with will be reflected in their classroom behavior. For example, some students who are the eldest children in large single-parent families may see their role as setting an example for younger siblings and excelling academically as a way to help the family. Family values can thus serve as a powerful source of motivation even in difficult circumstances.

What teachers need to remember is that, for the most part, a disadvantageous home life — such as that resulting from separation, poverty, or dysfunctional family dynamics — is often not the direct cause of difficulty in school in terms of behavior or academic performance. Rather, these situations may exacerbate issues that are already present in a child's conduct or academic development (Baum and Flores, 2011, p. 171). Equally important, teachers must recognize that just as these situations can worsen existing challenges, they can also serve as powerful motivation for students to overcome obstacles, depending on a family's values.

Staff Training in Functional Assessment

It is absolutely essential to provide comprehensive training to all members of an educational institution who will work with data-based, functional assessment problem-solving processes. This includes instructors, administrative staff, and those providing related services. All of these professionals need to be familiar with the same information, since they are each playing vital roles in carrying out essentially the same process: assisting with commonly encountered problems that can potentially have a negative impact on education (Knoff and Dyer, 2010, p. 51).

It is vital that the specific training these professionals undergo is data-based so that it is applicable to real situations in actual educational settings. Each of the three professional groups — those providing instruction, related services, and administrative support — must be familiar with the processes involved in alleviating student difficulties, so that those processes are streamlined and operate as seamlessly as possible. If these individuals were not familiar with the same problem-solving frameworks, implementation would be slower and the facilitation of a productive learning environment would suffer further, compounding the challenges already faced by students in difficult circumstances.

References

Baum, S., Flores, S.M. (2011). "Higher education and children in immigrant families." The Future of Children, 21(1): 171–193.

Knoff, H.M., Dyer, C. (2010). "RTI² — response to instruction and intervention." International Center for Leadership in Education. Retrieved from