Empowering students! How teachers can use wise interventions to encourage good performance
Study | August 2021
Children with a migration background sense when their background lowers others’ expectations of their performance. Teachers can use wise interventions to help these students develop confidence in their own abilities to actually achieve good results.
SVR scientific staff have conducted a research practice project funded by Stiftung Mercator on two of these teaching interventions: values affirmation and growth mindset. Over the course of one school year the interventions were tested as part of a quantitative study with 889 children in over fifty fifth-year classes in schools in North Rhine-Westphalia. The results of the “Empowering students” evaluation study indicate that both interventions are effective in practice and lead to improved performance in mathematics. In some cases the interventions continued to be effective right through the period of the Corona pandemic.
The project also resulted in a handbook that contains background information about the interventions as well as teaching and teacher-training materials. The handbook and a video are available at the following link (only available in German): https://www.svr-migration.de/weise-interventionen.de
