Educational Implications of the Values Held by Australian Aboriginal Students

Fogarty and White (1994) found that Australian Aboriginal university students tend to be more collectively minded than their non-Aboriginal counterparts. Using the Values Survey developed by Schwartz (1992), the present study set out to replicate this finding and to determine whether observed value differences can help to explain the low achievement levels of Aboriginal students in a university setting. The differences noted by Fogarty and White (1994) were replicated in the present study where data gathered from a sample of Aboriginal students (N = 202) over a six year period indicated that they score more highly on the collectivist scales of Conformity, Tradition, and Security than a non-Aboriginal student cohort (N = 194). Across the combined samples, however, scores on values were not strong predictors of academic success, with only Tradition (r = -.28, p < .01) and Conformity (r = .28, p < .01) showing appreciable relations with a measure of academic performance. When Race was partialled out of these correlations, Achievement (r = .16, p < .01) and Conformity (r = -.15, p < .01) were the only variables to demonstrate any relationship with performance. These findings suggest that there are factors other than value systems that have a much greater impact on the problems experienced by Australian Aborigines in higher educational settings. Educational Implications of Value Systems 3 Educational Implications of the Values Held by Australian Aboriginal Students In recent years, the Australian Government has made a concerted effort to make higher education more available to Aboriginals, a group that has been under-represented in the higher education sector. As part of this effort, agencies were established in higher education institutions to increase the participation of Aboriginal students and to provide support for any special preparatory needs. Despite the growing involvement of Aboriginal people in university education, however, major concerns have emerged in relation to retention and progression rates. McInerney (1991) reported that Aboriginal high school students perform poorly and have the lowest retention rates of any group in Australia. Other researchers have noted that Indigeneous students are under-represented among higher education graduates, a situation that is getting worse as the Indigenous population grows at a faster rate than the rest of the Australian population (Stanley & Hansen, 1998, p. 43). Statistics collated by the University of Southern Queensland over a seven year period suggest Aboriginal students are passing on average one out of every two units attempted. This figure is unacceptably low and the identification of causal factors has become a high priority. The present study investigated the influence of values on educational achievement. Specifically, it sought to determine whether previously demonstrated value differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students (Fogarty & White, 1994) accounted for substantial variance in academic performance. In reviewing the literature pertaining to educational achievement and persistence for Indigenous Australians, it is clear that cultural difference is a predominant theme. Researchers (e.g., Harris, 1990; Christie, 1985; Hughes & More, 1993; Malin, 1990; Guider, 1991; Peacock, 1993; Teasdale & Teasdale, 1992) have all noted and/or commented on differences in values, world views, cultural outlooks, learning styles or ways of learning for Indigenous students. These students come from a culture where the interests of the group are likely to be placed before those of the individual and where there is respect for traditional customs and ideas. These values describe what Hofstede (1980) defined as "collective" interests. For example, Teasdale & Teasdale (1992) suggested that the overriding feature of the Aboriginal system is its dependence on informal learning strategies whereby most knowledge is acquired incidentally through the day-to-day processes of socialisation. In this system, learning is generally self-motivated, not consciously goal directed, and has little need for verbal explanation. In Western educational contexts, however, a different set of values and modes of behaviour appear to be more conducive to academic achievement. These values and behaviours tend to be what Hofstede (1980) defined as "individualistic" in orientation and to involve constructs such as independence, self-direction, ambition, selfreliance, capability, creativity, curiosity, achievement and competition which are encouraged and fostered in the educational environment. The tendency to equate collective values and orientations with lowered academic achievement was evident as early as the 1950’s and 1960’s with the emergence of McClelland's achievement motivation theory. The theory placed strong emphasis on individualism, competition, internal locus of control and independence as prerequisites of achievement behaviour. McClelland (1961) concluded that East Asian and other non-Western groups (collectivist) were less motivated to succeed than Americans and Europeans. Rosen (1962) also found that when assessed with achievement motivation measures, people in collectivist societies typically emerged as being low in achievement motivation. However, a basic problem with achievement motivation theories was their reliance on assumptions that Western middle-class values should motivate people from other societies. This approach has waned in popularity in recent times, largely due to its failure to provide a framework for Educational Implications of Value Systems 4 enhancing motivation and its failure to take sufficient account of culture-specific notions of motivation and achievement. A more suitable overall framework for investigating the role in values in a cross cultural context is provided by Schwartz and Bilsky's (1987) theory of universal human values. Their theory proposed that the full range of values in all cultures could be defined in terms of a set of goals or motivational domains that values are intended to express. In their original formulation, there were seven of these motivational domains. Drawing on the work of other researchers (e.g., Braithwaite & Law, 1985), Schwartz and Bilsky (1990) extended the range of motivational types to ten. The Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) was developed by Schwartz (1992) to measure these ten types. Because of the importance of this theory to the present study, the ten domains are described in Table1. Fogarty and White (1994) found reliable differences between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal students on some of the Schwartz dimensions. Aboriginal students placed greater emphasis on the collectivist values of Conformity, Tradition, and Security and were less prepared to endorse individualistic values orientations associated with Achievement, Selfdirection, Stimulation and Hedonism. The finding that Aboriginal students differ significantly from a peer group of non-Aboriginal students concerning values that serve collective as opposed to individual interests is likely to have educational implications. For example, Triandis, Leung, Villareal, & Clark. (1985) found that idiocentric individuals (those placing higher importance on individual oriented values) had higher academic motivation and placed a greater emphasis on social recognition and competition, characteristics that are valued in most western educational contexts. Support for the contention that idiocentrism is positively related to academic success and that allocentrism (collective values) is negatively related to academic success was also provided by Dabul, Bernal & Knight (1995) in a study that compared Mexican American and Anglo American adolescents. They found that adolescents who valued idiocentrism had higher academic competency and grade point averages than those valuing allocentrism. In the Fogarty and White (1994) study, the differences that emerged between the two cultures on values associated with the Conformity, Tradition and Security domains suggests that many Aboriginal students will accord collective goals such as family obligations and relationship maintenance a higher priority than more individualistic and competitive educational goals. These suppositions about the role of values in educational achievement, although plausible, have yet to be tested. We do not know of any previous empirical investigations of the relationship between values and educational achievement for Australian Aboriginal university students. Indeed, apart from those mentioned above, there appear to have been few studies of any kind that have explored the relations between values and behaviour. As Roe and Ester (1999) commented, values research to date has been rather narrow, tending to concentrate on the structure of values. In an educational context, Feather (1972) showed that school children are happier and better adjusted when there is a match between their own value systems and the perceived value systems of their schools. It has also been shown that Australian university students tend to place a higher value on the academic skills of reading, writing and speaking when compared with more collectively-minded Malaysian university students who tend to favour speaking, practical and social skills (Gill & Keats, 1980). Working with Australian student samples, Lokan and Shears (1995) found that values show small (less than .2) but significant relationships with general scholastic aptitude measures and teacher ratings of school achievement. More specifically, in research conducted with Australian Aboriginal samples, McInerney (1991, 1995) has shown that self-reliance and confidence are determinants of Aboriginal students' attitude to leaving school. Self-reliance as defined by McInerney is not Educational Implications of Value Systems 5 substantially different from Schwartz's (1992) Self-Direction value type. McInerney, Hinkley & Dowson (1997) also found that compared with Indigeneous students, their nonIndigeneous groups agreed more strongly that excellence, task orientation, and competitiveness are characteristics of successful students in general. They suggested that this result could illustrate the advantage that non-Indigeneous groups have in academic settings, which emphasise the achievement of these individualistic goals as a measure of success. These studies have tended to use differing measures of the value construct or equated measures of attitudes and intentions with values. Nevertheless, the studies are consistent in suggesting that scores on certain primary value dimensions should be correlated with measures of academic performance. These expectations allowed us to generate a set of hypotheses, which are described below.