CLS Research Briefs
Connecting Research to Practice in Tennessee
October, 2002
Self-Beliefs:
Predicting Persistence of Families First Participants in Adult Basic Education
Since 1996, Families First in Tennessee has provided adult education classes for welfare recipients without a high school credential and many have earned a General Educational Development (GED) certificate. However, a number of the welfare recipients who choose to enroll do not persist long enough to increase their basic skills or earn GED. The purpose of this study was to identify self-beliefs of Families First participants that can predict persistence in adult basic education.
The self-beliefs that adults develop and hold to be true may be powerful forces in their success or failure in educational or employment activities. Four dispositional variables are associated with persistence. Attitudes toward school stem from past schooling experiences that helped shape adults’ perceptions including beliefs about the efficacy of attending school. Self-efficacy is the belief about one’s abilities, an estimate of one’s confidence for successfully accomplishing a particular task such as mathematics or reading. Resilience is the ability to manage or cope with adversity or stress in effective ways; resilient people bounce back from adversity. Attribution is the belief about the cause of one’s success or failure. The study addressed the question: To what extent do self-beliefs predict whether welfare recipients who enroll in adult basic education persist in the program?
Study participants were 254 Families First clients who enrolled in Adult Education from ten different counties in Tennessee. Their attendance was tracked for 90 days from the time of their enrollment. All participants were administered a survey that included self-report questions developed to elicit their attitudes toward school, self-efficacy, resilience, and attributions for successes and failures in adult education. The items ultimately comprised the Adult Education Persistence Scale (AEPS). Among other results of the study, it was found that older students had higher attendance and that a combination of AEPS scores and age could accurately predict persistence in 76% of the students.
Implications for adult education teachers from this study include several specific suggestions: (a) to provide training to recognize unhealthy attributions (e.g., “Things never go right for me.”) and work toward healthy attributions (e.g., “Things will work out if I keep at it.”); (b) to create an adult-oriented environment; (c) make academic tasks meaningful, relevant, and “do-able”; (d) to provide opportunities for frequent success experiences; (e) to openly address attitudes and attributions; and (f) to model and validate “I can” attitudes and statements. Self-beliefs account for only a part of the persistence of FF participants in adult basic education; however, the AEPS is a first step in assessing self-beliefs and the impact they have on persistence for welfare recipients who enrolled in adult basic education classes.