Expansive care theory : can messages of inspiring expectations and broad regard promote students' identity safety and academic success?
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In this dissertation, I present Expansive Care Theory, which suggests that instructors can create conditions for student success by conveying two messages: 1) "I have high expectations for you to learn and grow, and want to support you in that growth" (inspiring expectations) and 2) "I regard you as a full person, with a range of identities, values, and interests" (broad regard). Past work has suggested that students who perceive either one of these messages from their teachers have improved academic performance (e.g., wise feedback and values-affirmation interventions, respectively). However, these messages have rarely been understood in terms of students' perceptions of teacher practices, nor combined under an integrated theoretical framework. In Chapter 1, I review past literature to propose these two messages can alleviate social identity threat and bolster teacher-student relationships, and in combination can create emergent feelings of care and support in the classroom, which in turn improve academic outcomes. In Chapter 2, I present initial evidence that these messages are most effective in improving students' positive expectations of the classroom and teacher when provided in combination. In Chapters 3-5, I focus on broad regard, and suggest that the practices and resources that educators use to engage students may be more effective to the extent that they explicitly convey broad regard to students. In Chapter 3, I show that values affirmation interventions—which ask students to reflect on their values and have been conceptualized as working primarily within students' individual psychology—are enhanced when these activities are framed in terms of teachers' broad regard for students. In Chapter 4, I examine advising relationships in college, and find undergraduate students view advisors as more helpful when they ask broad regard questions about students' lives compared to questions that are more narrowly focused on students' academic success. In Chapter 5, I examine how office hours are represented to college students. I present a novel randomized-controlled intervention and pre-registered replication, finding that when office hours are represented by course instructors in terms of broad regard—as an opportunity for discussing anything on the student's mind and learning about the student's life—first-generation and underrepresented minority students earn higher grades. I conclude with Chapter 6, suggesting future directions to further refine this theory and understand its potential for practical application in educational settings and beyond
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Smith, Eric Nathan | |
|---|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Walton, Gregory M. (Gregory Mariotti) | |
| Thesis advisor | Walton, Gregory M. (Gregory Mariotti) | |
| Thesis advisor | Dweck, Carol S, 1946- | |
| Degree committee member | Crum, Alia | |
| Degree committee member | Dweck, Carol S, 1946- | |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Psychology. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Eric Nathan Smith |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Psychology |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Eric Nathan Smith
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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