Online Degree

There is no single theory or model that explains adult learning. This should come as no surprise, as adults engage in learning for myriad reasons and in virtually unlimited settings. Adults become involved in learning for such wide-ranging purposes as work/career-related learning and training, literacy and basic skills development, earning credentials or degrees, social change or online education and e-learning, and personal growth, enrichment, and enjoyment. Adult learning takes place in such diverse settings as colleges and universities, public schools, business and workplace settings, health and human services agencies, churches, civic organizations, and government agencies, including the military. Although there is no single theory or model that can fully explain online education, there are nonetheless several theories or concepts that illustrate the scope of what is known about e-learning online degree. Five of these are described in the following sections.
Andragogy
Andragogy is a concept that can be traced back to the 19th century. However, it came into prominence in adult learning during the late 1960s and early 1970s through the work of Malcolm Knowles. Knowles was looking for a framework to distinguish adult learning from learning in childhood (pedagogy). Later, Knowles suggested that pedagogy and andragogy are not limited to children and adults, respectively, but are more matched to the maturity and experience of the learner in a given setting. Though andragogy is sometimes described as a theory, it is probably more accurate to describe it as a set of assumptions about how people learn online degree. According to andragogy, as learners mature,
1. their self-concept moves from being dependent to
increasing levels of self-directedness;
2. the role of the learners’ experience becomes an
increasingly valuable resource, and adult learning
is optimized when learners are able to tap into their
experience;
3. readiness to learn in adulthood is increasingly based
on real-life needs and situations;
4. there is a shift from learning for future application
toward learning to address immediate needs;
5. intrinsic motivators become increasingly more
important than extrinsic ones; and
6. before learning something, adults typically need to
know why they need to learn it.
Although some critics have challenged andragogy because its focus is largely on the individual learner and does not directly address the social context in which learning takes place, andragogy retains an important place as a set of practices that have value when working with adult learners.
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Self-Directed Learning
Closely related to the first assumption of andra-gogy, self-directed learning emerged in the early 1970s as one of the most systematic areas of research and scholarship on adult learning. Much of this interest grew out of the research of Allen Tough, which was mentioned earlier in this entry, on adults’ learning projects. Subsequently, two individuals who have played a key role in developing this work, both through their own writings and through their many doctoral graduates, are Roger Hiemstra and Huey Long. They earned online degrees. Though there are many definitions, models, and conceptualizations of self-directed learning, it is essentially where the learners assume primary responsibility for and control over their learning. In 1991, Ralph Brockett and Roger Hiemstra synthesized ideas from several previous authors to present a model that describes self-direction as the product of two factors: the teaching-learning situation and internal characteristics of the learner. Out of this body of research, several ideas have emerged: first, self-directed learning is the most frequent way in which adults choose to learn; second, self-directedness has a strong connection to how learners feel about themselves as learners; third, several personality and social characteristics seem to have a connection to self-directedness; and finally, research on self-directed learning has probably contributed to a more holistic understanding of adult learners’ potential.
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Transformative Learning
Experience lies at the heart of adult learning. In most approaches to learning in adulthood, experience is acknowledged to be an important resource for the learner. However, it is not merely having an experience that matters; rather, it is the way in which the learner makes meaning of the experience and is changed by the experience that is important. In the 1970s, Jack Mezirow reported on a study of women who had returned to college. He described a process similar to consciousness-raising that took place for many of the women. Instead of simply acquiring knowledge, the experience of returning to college often resulted in a transformation that transcended the college experience and led to a redefining of the self. Initially, Mezirow referred to this process as perspective transformation and laid the foundation for a theory that has evolved over the ensuing three decades. Mezirow cited several key influences including Jiirgen Habermas (critical theory), Roger Gould (psychoanalytic psychology), Paulo Freire (conscientization), and Thomas Kuhn (paradigm shifts). Through exchanges with various scholars who challenged aspects of Mezirow’s theory, particularly those related to the emphasis on social change, Mezirow and these scholars refined the theory over time and began to use terms such as transformation theory, transformational learning, and transformative learning to describe this concept.
Transformative learning typically begins with a disorienting dilemma that makes it necessary for a person to examine existing assumptions and frames of reference online degree. Examples of a disorienting dilemma include job loss, diagnosis of an illness such as cancer or diabetes, loss of a spouse or partner through death or divorce, or some sort of spiritual awakening. The dilemma, by its nature, redefines this aspect of one’s life in a way that cuts across one’s roles, responsibilities, and identity. Transformative learning involves a process of challenging assumptions in a way that helps one redefine oneself. An example of this would be an adult who returns to higher education and finds oneself immersed in study in a way that the person becomes socialized in an academic or professional field, and this new identity emerges as a vital part of who the person becomes.
In recent years, the literature on transformative learning has snowballed as various scholars have expanded on Mezirow’s original ideas. John Dirkx, for example, has online degree and he distinguished among four types of transformational learning. He describes Mezirow’s view as a “cognitive-rational” perspective, which shares con-structivist theoretical underpinnings with Freire’s “emancipatory” approach but differs from Freire by emphasizing the process of reflection and rational thought. A third approach is the “developmental” perspective of Larry Daloz, which is holistic and contextually based and emphasizes how individuals negotiate developmental transitions in their lives. Finally, Dirkx describes a “spiritual-integrative” approach that extends beyond the rational approach to focus on feelings and images emerging from e-learning and online education. The point here is that Mezirow’s work is seminal to understanding transformative learning, and subsequent work by various individuals, including work published in such sources as Adult Education Quarterly and the more recent Journal of Transformative Learning online degree, demonstrates that this topic has assumed a central place in current scholarship on adult learning.
Humanism and Behaviorism
As with the field of educational psychology in general, humanism and behaviorism have held an important place in the conceptual foundations of adult learning. Humanism, with its view of human nature as basically good and the belief that individuals have virtually unlimited potential for growth, is particularly attractive to those seeking to bring out the best that adult learners can achieve online degree. In humanistic adult education, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are among the seminal thinkers. The humanist perspective underlies many of the tenets of andragogy and self-directed learning and is most often reflected in adult learning activities directed toward personal growth or improvement.
Behaviorism has also had a strong influence in the area of adult learning. With emphasis on reinforcement, learning for mastery, and helping people achieve competency in what is being learned, behaviorism has been especially influential in settings where performance and measurable outcomes are of primary importance. The influence of behaviorism is perhaps strongest in adult learning situations such as training in business and industry and adult literacy settings, where achieving measurable outcomes is deemed central to the success of learning. It can also be found where learning is designed to help people change specific behaviors, such as weight loss, smoking cessation, and substance abuse learning efforts.
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E-learning knowledge is socially constructed outside of the individual learner, these approaches are especially compatible with learning for social change. However, those who approach online education from critical and postmodern orientations tend to reject or minimize the importance of theories and research derived from a psychological orientation. For those interested in online degree and the psychology of adult learning, critical and postmodern theories pose a challenge in terms of the degree to which emphasis should be placed on individual and social dimensions of learning.
Ralph G. Brockett
EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

AFRICAN AMERICANS
This entry provides a summary of issues related to African Americans. It begins with a brief overview of the history and geographical distribution of African Americans in the United States. This is followed by brief descriptions of attitudes affecting African Americans, including their attitudes toward the majority culture, religion and politics, racial identity, and African Americans in society. Next is a summary of the schooling experiences of, and educational outcomes for, African Americans and an overview of some of the major explanations for the achievement patterns of African American students. Despite decades of educational research, African Americans continue to have achievement levels that are substantially below their White and East Asian counterparts, on average, and this achievement gap has been the subject of consider-able research in the field of educational psychology.
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African Americans in the United States
At 12.3% of the population, African Americans are the second largest minority group in the United States, behind Hispanics who make up 12.5% of the U.S. population. Also commonly referred to as Black Americans, African Americans are still the single largest racial minority group in the country. Many Black biracial individuals and foreign-born Blacks also self-identify as African American. However, both of these groups are quite small, constituting less than 1% and 5% of the Black population, respectively. Black immigrants to the United States are from three primary regions: the Caribbean, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa.
In the early 1600s, some of the first Africans were brought to the United States as indentured servants. However, by the mid-1600s, the status of Africans in the United States had been changed to slaves. By the end of the legal slave trade in 1808, more than 500,000 Africans had been brought into the United States, primarily to work on the plantations in the southern states. Until the Great African American Migration (1910-1920), 90% of the African American population lived in the South, and less than 25% lived in urban areas. This early 20th-century migration of African Americans eventually yielded settlement patterns that are reflected in the United States today, with substantial concentrations of African Americans in the urban centers of the northeastern and midwestern United States.
The South still has the largest concentration of African Americans in the country, with more than 50% of the Black population. Nonetheless, African Americans constitute less than 20% of the South’s population. African Americans make up about 11 % of the populations in the Northeast and Midwest and about 5% of the population in the West. The top 10 residential areas for African Americans include the following metropolitan areas, in descending order: New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles/Long Beach, Houston, Baltimore, and Dallas. Although there have been declines in segregation over the past three dec-ades, African Americans still live in highly segregated neighborhoods, and the metropolitan areas with the largest concentrations of African Americans also have the highest levels of residential segregation. Affluent African Americans also live in areas with high levels of residential segregation, and children experience the highest segregation levels at home and in school.
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Attitudes Affecting African Americans
African Americans report a substantial amount of mistrust of Whites, and a majority of African Americans report experiencing racial discrimination at least once a year. African Americans report marked mistrust of the police and are more likely than other ethnic groups to believe in conspiracy theories. Thus, many African Americans believe that the majority culture does not want positive outcomes for their group. The increasing numbers of legal challenges to affirmative action, alongside media accounts of police brutality, reports of discrimination in housing and bank loans, and concerns about the disenfranchise-ment of Black voters in recent national elections, are seen as providing support for this hypothesis.
There is some evidence that African Americans’ beliefs are not wholly without merit. Although overt negative attitudes toward African Americans have decreased in the broader society, recent research suggests that racist attitudes have become more covert over time and that aversive (unconscious) racism still plays a major role in the lives of African Americans. Thus, although fewer than 5% of Americans endorse negative stereotypes of African Americans, social psy-chology research reveals differential responses to African Americans in several circumstances. For example, in bystander intervention studies, individuals respond equally to Whites and Blacks when an emergency occurs only if they are the only witness; they are less likely to assist Blacks when there are multiple witnesses. Also, people report the same number of negative characteristics for Whites and Blacks but report significantly more positive characteristics for Whites. Similarly, in evaluating job candidates, Black and White candidates with comparable weak and moderate skills are rated equally, but White candidates with strong skills are rated substantially higher than Black candidates with equally strong skills.
African American racial identity attitudes have also received considerable research scrutiny. Black racial identity was first conceptualized as a stage theory, with African Americans moving from an anti-Black stage to a pro-Black stage, with concomitant increases in self-concept. Recent theorizing conceives of Black racial identity as consisting of a set of multidimensional attitudes. Studies have provided support for several Black racial identity attitudes, including low salience attitudes, high salience attitudes, pro-Black attitudes, anti-Black attitudes, anti-White attitudes, and multicultural attitudes. Recently, researchers have demonstrated generalizable racial identity profiles in the population, although it is not yet clear how these will affect functioning. Several scholars have suggested that in the social context of the United States, many African Americans will have some minimal level of negative attitudes toward Whites.
Religion continues to play a major role in African American life, and the church has been one of the most important forces in the African American community. Estimates indicate that there are more than 60,000 Black churches in the United States, and African Americans have considerable membership numbers in several Christian and Islamic denominations. From a religious point of view, African Americans are generally conservative. However, on the political spectrum, African Americans are generally aligned with the Democratic Party. Initially strong supporters of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party after the American Civil War, African American political allegiance shifted as the Republicans compromised with southern states on issues of civil rights. For much of the past 30 years, more than 80% of African American voters have been affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the 109th Congress included 43 African Americans (1 senator and 42 representatives), all of whom were Democrats.
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EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Educational issues
African Americans comprise approximately 17% of the enrollment in public schools. However, they constitute about 20% of the students in special education, 30% of the students in vocational education, 23% of the students in alternative schools, and only 12% of the students in gifted and talented programs. African Americans also make up 10% of the private school enrollment. Overrepresentation in special education is greatest in the categories of mental retardation, developmental delay, emotional disturbance, deaf-blind, autism, and multiple disabilities. In contrast with the school population nationally, which is concentrated in suburban schools, more than 50% of African American students attend urban schools. On average, African Americans attend schools of lower quality with higher levels of segregation than other groups, even though it is 50 years after the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision. In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court indicated that schools that were separate were inherently unequal. African American students report concerns about violence and the availability of drugs, alcohol, and weap-ons in the schools that they attend in substantially greater percentages than do other ethnic and racial groups.
One of the more persistent problems in the education arena is the achievement gap between African Americans, Latinas/os, and Native Americans on the one hand, and Whites and Asian Americans on the other. On average, African American students enter elementary school with weaker math, vocabulary, and reading skills than their White counterparts, even after controlling for parents’ education levels, and this gap in achievement widens from Grades 1 to 12. Significantly fewer African American preschoolers and kin-dergartners can identify all the colors and alphabet letters, and twice as many African Americans in this age group are diagnosed with learning disabilities compared with their White counterparts. The event dropout rate (i.e., the percentage of students who dropped out of high school in a given year) for African American students is about 6%, and the status dropout rate (i.e., the percentage of individuals in the population from a certain age group who are not enrolled in school and have not earned a high school diploma) for African Americans aged 16 to 24 is approximately 13%. Dropout rates for African Americans declined substantially from the 1970s, but they stabilized in the late 1990s. In some urban districts, African American graduation rates are below 50%.
Data from longitudinal studies of school-age adolescents indicate that African American students miss more days of school than the aggregate U.S. student population and have the highest suspension and expulsion rates. African American students also report spending more time watching television on weekdays and weekends. African American males are overrep-resented in both incarcerated youth and youth on probation. These disparities are also reflected in both educational and occupational attainment. African Americans have lower college enrollment and graduation rates than do White and Asian students, and the percentages of African American workers decrease as one moves from clerical up to professional positions.
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Explanations of African American Achievement Patterns
Several explanations have been advanced for African American underachievement, although it is likely that no single factor provides a complete explanation of this complex issue. Many of the initial arguments focused on environmental deficits. For example, it was assumed that African American homes were culturally deficient in ways that precluded academic achievement. However, differences related to academic achievement (e.g., quantity and quality of language in the home) were related more closely to class than to racial group. Deficits in the segregated schools that African Americans attended were also identified as a major concern, and one of the major legal accomplishments of the civil rights era was the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision in 1954. This decision led to decades of desegregation plans by school districts, some of which are still in place.
Another long-standing argument has been based in biology and genetics—that is, African Americans have lower scores on measures of g (general intelligence) and consequently lower academic achievement. However, this explanation has been criticized for ignoring data on the increase in IQ scores over the past century (the Flynn effect), the reciprocal relationship between effective schooling and IQ, and the differential contributions of IQ to the variance in achievement across socioeconomic groups. There have also been suggestions that African Americans have different cultural styles than Whites and that there is a mismatch between Black cultural styles and the common methods of teaching in the school system. However, this suggestion has not been supported in empirical studies, in part due to the failure of researchers to adequately define and operationalize culture.
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Socioeconomic status has also been put forward as a reason for African Americans’ underachievement, as there is a moderate relationship between poverty and academic achievement. African Americans are one of the poorer groups in the United States, with 25% of African American adults and 33% of African American children living below the poverty line. In addition, more than 40% of the African American population live in households with annual incomes of less than $25,000, and African Americans comprise about 40% of the homeless population. Black males also have the highest unemployment rate, and only 12% of all African American households report incomes of more than $75,000. Although socioeconomic status plays a role, there are data indicating that the achievement gap is present at all socioeconomic levels.
Although there are consistent positive relationships between academic achievement and several psychoso-cial variables across racial and ethnic groups, including academic self-concept, academic self-efficacy, self-regulation, motivation, and future time perspective, there have been few studies of these constructs in African American populations, and the studies that exist have been of limited utility in explaining the achievement gap. African American students consistently report higher self-concept scores and educational and occupational expectations, despite lower academic achievement. There is a growing consensus that the motivation and future orientation of African Americans may be affected by the marginalized status of African Americans in society. African American role models in the public sphere are more frequently entertainers and athletes than academics.
Another set of explanations for African American achievement is psychosocial and implicates African Americans’ collective or social identity, also referred to as their reference group orientation. Perhaps the best-known of these explanations is the cultural ecological theory proposed by the late educational anthropologist, John Ogbu. This model has been used to explain achievement differences across racial and ethnic groups around the world, including Australia, Great Britain, Japan, and the United Kingdom, and has also been used to explain achievement differences among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. In brief, cultural ecological theory suggests that one of the ways in which African American educational success is compromised is due to the group eschewing attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to educational attainment if the attitudes and behaviors are seen as “acting White.”
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Another explanation involving reference group orientation is the stereotype threat phenomenon proposed by Claude Steele, a social psychologist. This argument focuses on the pervasiveness of stereotypes in the populations and suggests that the strong negative stereotype about African Americans’ intellectual capacities in the population can have a detrimental impact on African American performance in situations (e.g., academic evaluations of performance) where the stereotype is salient. Some researchers suggest that African Americans who care the most about doing well and have a strong sense of bonding to their racial group are potentially at greater risk for stereotype threat. Although much of the early research on stereotype threat was conducted with college-age samples, recent studies have demonstrated the negative impact of stereotype threat on school-age African Americans.
More recently, researchers have found that African American college students who are high in race-based rejection sensitivity are less likely to seek assistance in predominantly White institutions and more likely to be socially isolated, potentially decreasing their chances of persisting until graduation. Finally, researchers who study racial and ethnic identity in African Americans have hypothesized that some racial identity profiles may be more compatible with schooling outcomes than others, although there are limited data in support of this hypothesis. In addition, there are data that indicate that African Americans do not have to abandon their racial identity to be successful in school.
Several other theoretical perspectives implicate atti-tudinal and personal identity variables in academic performance. Self-worth theory suggests that students who are concerned with protecting their academic self-concept may choose not to study for examinations or engage actively in learning, thus providing a clear rationale for poor performance (i.e., not studying), rather than studying and taking the chance that they fail and be perceived as unintelligent. Another motivational perspective suggests that African American adolescents may have to choose between belonging to their racial group or being high achievers, leading many capable African American students to resist showing their true academic potential (i.e., / can, but do I want to?). Other researchers have reinvigorated the literature on teacher expectation effects by demonstrating that students can recognize differential behaviors by teachers toward high and low performers from the early elementary years onward. These findings suggest that the differential treatment of students perceived as more capable and less capable has direct effects on students’ classroom functioning. The findings also indicate that minority students, who can recognize that they are members of stigmatized groups from the elementary school years, may be especially sensitive to the messages that teachers are communicating.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Health Disparities
As with the achievement gap, there are disparities in health between African Americans and White Americans across the life span. African Americans are either first or second with regard to infant mortality rates, low birthweight infants, and teenage pregnancies. African Americans also have the highest death rates in the United States, both generally and from specific causes such as heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, female breast cancer, and homicide. African Americans make up a substantial proportion of males (34.7%), females (60.5%), and children (61%) dying from AIDS. With regard to mental health issues, African Americans have less insurance and are also less willing to seek treatment, resulting in lower access to mental health care. The dearth of African American providers also contributes to an unwillingness to seek treatment.
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Research Agenda
African Americans make up a substantial portion of the U.S. population. They are a group with a unique place in the history and current sociopolitical context of the United States, and their academic achievement relative to members of the majority culture represents one of the most intractable problems facing educational psychology. Educational psychologists need to develop a comprehensive research agenda on this issue. Although efforts to close the achievement gap continue apace, it is perhaps time to rethink the approach to African American achievement. Data from the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that Whites and Asian/Pacific Islanders in the fourth and eighth grades had higher reading achievement scores, 22 to 29 points higher, than their Black, Hispanic, and American Indian counterparts. Moreover, these scores have remained relatively unchanged for much of the past decade.
Beginning in 2002, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act required school districts to disaggregate student performance data on the basis of demographic variables, including ethnicity, gender, race, and socioeconomic status. One result of this requirement was to highlight the disparities in educational performance among groups at the local level, disparities heretofore seen only in national data. NCLB also proposes eliminating the achievement gap by 2014. However, there are still no explanations of the achievement gap that are accepted as definitive by large segments of the research community. Genetic, biological, environmental, demographic, and psycho-social explanations have both proponents and critics, and there are no studies in which combinations of all of these variables have been systematically examined.
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Educational research indicates that effective interventions (e.g., Sesame Street) often have positive consequences for those who need them as well as for those who could have done without them. Thus, in the absence of interventions targeted specifically at and solely to African Americans, it may be difficult to close the achievement gap. However, the achievement gap between African Americans and Whites may not be the only issue that merits attention. An alternative perspective suggests focusing attention at the achievement levels that African Americans attain. From this perspective, educators should be concerned with ensuring that all African Americans attain at least basic proficiency in the core academic subjects and the skills to pursue advanced educational opportunities.
Research indicates that effective teachers make a difference in student performance and that the impact is cumulative over multiple school years, but it is not clear how these findings relate to African American student achievement. Nor is it clear how teacher education programs need to change to prepare teachers to not only be effective but also convey appropriate messages to African American students. Effective teacher training needs to counter the increased susceptibility of African American students to negative messages conveyed by teachers and help teachers counter aversive racism. More research is needed on the relationships between African American collective identity and psychosocial variables that are proximally related to academic achievement (e.g., self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and anticipation of success) and on the mechanisms that are effective in supporting these variables in African American students. Finally, researchers need to assess how much variance in African American student achievement is attributable to racial identity attitudes, oppositional identity, and stereotype threat, and which behaviors and attitudes are compatible with high academic achievement and African American ethnic heritage.
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As should be clear, there are many questions that remain unanswered with regard to African Americans and schooling in the United States. Effectively addressing the educational issues related to African Americans will require a focused research agenda and collaboration between researchers and school districts with large numbers of African Americans. Educational researchers concerned with equity, and with African Americans specifically, have a challenging and worthwhile task that requires urgent attention.
Frank C. Worrell

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Aggression is a common problem among schoolchildren and results in negative psychological, educational, and social outcomes for both aggressors and victims. This entry considers this aggression from both sides, that is, the side of the aggressors and the side of their victims. More specifically, it defines the terms aggression and peer victimization and reviews prevalence estimates of each. It also reviews the consequences of aggression for both aggressors and victims, as well as the antecedents or risk factors for each. This entry then moves beyond these generalities to discuss some of the subtypes of aggression and victimization. Finally, it offers some conclusions that can be drawn from the existing research and describes likely future directions for studying aggression.

Definitions and Prevalence
Aggressive behavior can be defined as any act that is aimed at harming another individual. More specifically, the study of childhood aggression often involves aggressive behaviors among peers, that is, children of similar ages (excluding aggression toward or from adults). Using this definition, attention is placed both on aggressors, who frequently enact aggression toward their peers, and on victims, who are often the targets of aggression by peers. It is important to note that some children may be considered both aggressors and victims; these aggressive-victims often have outcomes and risk factors that are distinct from children who are only aggressors or only victims.
Prevalence estimates of aggressors, victims, and aggressive-victims vary widely across studies because of different measurement strategies (e.g., reliance on children’s self-reports or nominations of peers, teacher reports, observations) and criteria for classifying children (e.g., many studies define a child as a victim if they are targeted about once a week or more, but others will consider entire school years or lifetime incidents). Despite this variability across studies, it appears that about 10% to 20% of children can be considered aggressors, 10% to 20% can be considered victims, and 5% to 10% can be considered aggressive-victims. These prevalence estimates are remarkably consistent across countries, so it appears that aggression is a problem among schoolchildren worldwide. It is also worth noting that although these prevalence estimates would suggest that most children (50%-75%) are not directly involved as aggressors and/or victims, most children play some role in aggressive incidents, often serving as assistants or reinforcers to aggressors or as defenders of victims.
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Consequences
The substantial prevalence of aggression and victimization is especially alarming when one considers the serious negative consequences of each. Aggressive children are often disliked by their normative (nonag-gressive) peers and affiliate with delinquent peers who may solidify and expand the child’s antisocial tendencies. Aggressive children are also often disengaged from school, either by their own choice or through negative teacher reactions, suspensions, and expulsions. These negative consequences of childhood are often exacerbated over time, leading to further delinquency, substance use, and school dropout during adolescence and to criminal behavior, poor marital relations, and unemployment/underemployment during adulthood. Of course, these associations are not perfect, and most aggressive children will discon-tinue, or at least decrease, their use of aggression with time and lead normal, well-adapted lives (in fact, there is evidence that most early adolescents will engage in some antisocial behavior, generally with few long-term consequences). At the same time, these long-term associations suggest that childhood aggression places individuals at increased risk for negative trajectories, and such behavior should certainly not be dismissed as “kids being kids.”
As might be expected, victims of peer aggres-sion suffer in numerous ways as a consequence of being abused. Victimization often leads to diminished self-esteem and increases in internalizing problems (depression, anxiety, social withdrawal). Victims also tend to have poorer academic adjustment, including lower grades, disliking of school, and truancy; these consequences are intuitive if we imagine, as adults, how we would perform at work if we expected that someone might assault us on our next break. Victimization also leads to poor social outcomes, in the forms of having fewer friends, having friendships of poorer quality, and being disliked by most peers. This is unfortunate because the psychological consequences of victimization are diminished for victims who have good social support (e.g., friendships). Although the empirical evidence is limited, that which is available indicates that these negative consequences are long-lasting and persist as increased rates of depression and problematic romantic relationships, for example.
Children who are both aggressors and victims tend to suffer even more serious adjustment difficulties than children who are only aggressors or only victims. The additive risks alone of being both aggressive and victimized suggest negative adjustment, and these aggressive-victims do indeed appear to suffer the short- and long-term consequences of both aggressors and victims. Moreover, there is some evidence that these aggressive-victims suffer even worse outcomes than would be predicted by the additive effects of aggression and victimization. It is unclear if the dual roles of aggressor and victim are especially detrimental, or if the same risk factors that predict children becoming aggressive-victims (e.g., neurological deficits, histories of parental abuse) also contribute to their long-term maladjustment. Nevertheless, these children represent a special cause for concern.
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Risk Factors
Given the prevalence and negative consequences of aggression and victimization, researchers have sought to identify factors that place children at risk for enacting and/or receiving aggression.
Predictors of aggressive behavior can be found in both home and peer contexts. Specifically, the home environments of children who enact aggression tend to be characterized by marital conflict and frequent aggression (e.g., domestic violence). Furthermore, aggression is predicted by parenting styles of inappropriate permissiveness or lack of monitoring of children’s behavior, negative or rejecting behaviors toward children, and of physical punishment and/or inconsistent discipline of children’s behavior. In the peer context, research has shown that experiences of peer rejection and victimization predict increases in aggression, as do group social norms encouraging aggressive behavior and affiliation with aggressive and/or delinquent peers. It is worth noting that some of these peer-group risk factors for aggression are also consequences of aggression; thus, initial home environment may contribute to children’s aggressive behavior, which results in peer relations that further solidify and exacerbate aggressive tendencies.
Victims of peer aggression are more often physically weak, suffer internalizing problems (i.e., depression, anxiety), and have lower self-concept than nonvicti-mized peers; each of these factors might make children less likely or less able to behave assertively or defend themselves, which may contribute to them being viewed as “easy targets” by potential aggressors. Similar to aggression, risk factors for peer victimization can also be found in both home and peer contexts. Parents who provide little support or responsiveness to their children’s needs tend to have children who are more likely to be victimized by peers. Other parenting risk factors differ by gender; for instance, overprotectiveness and enmeshment predict victimization for boys (presumably leading to the failure to develop age-appropriate assertiveness), whereas coerciveness and threats of rejection are more predictive for girls (presumably leading to low self-concept). For both boys and girls, peer rejection, lack of friends, and engagement in antipathetic relationships (e.g., enemies) in the peer group place children at risk for victimization. Again, it should be noted that these peer-group risk factors are also con-sequences of victimization, suggesting the vicious cycle between peer victimization and poor peer relations in which children can become trapped.
Although aggressive-victims often have risk factors similar both to aggressors and to victims, there is also evidence of distinct risk factors. In the home context, rates of parental abuse and physical punishment are dramatically higher for aggressive-victims than for other children, and aggressive-victims tend to be rejected more and have fewer friends than either aggressors or victims. Although this entry has not focused on biological origins, it is worth noting that aggressive-victims have high rates of neurological deficits and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well. It is believed that these home and peer-group experiences (and possibly the biological risk factors) lead to hostile attribution biases (i.e. tendencies to interpret ambiguous behavior by others as hostile in intent), which contribute to aggressive-victims’ behavior and further maltreatment by peers.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

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Subtypes
Despite the general findings regarding aggression and victimization reviewed above, not all acts of aggression are the same. Instead, aggressive behavior can be distinguished in terms of the form that it takes, the function that it serves, and the relationship context in which it occurs.
Forms
Historically, attention has been directed primarily toward studying overt forms of aggression, such as hitting, pushing, or teasing. More recently, however, researchers have realized that aggression also occurs in a more covert form. This type of aggression, variously called relational, social, or covert aggression, includes behaviors such as gossiping, spreading rumors, excluding the victim from groups, and manip-ulating relationships in a hurtful manner.
Overt versus relational forms of aggression and victimization differ according to age, sex, and context. Developmentally, physical aggression occurs most commonly during early childhood, and verbal forms emerge with increasing language capacities during early to middle childhood; in contrast, relational forms of aggression become more common during adolescence as knowledge of social structure, time spent with peers, and importance placed on peer relations all increase. The historical focus on overt forms of aggression has led to the notion that boys are more aggressive than girls, but more recent considerations of the various forms of aggression have shown that girls and boys are approximately equal in the amount of relational aggression enacted and in the amount received. Finally, there is evidence that different contexts support different forms of aggression, with overt aggression being more commonly enacted on playgrounds and similar areas without adult supervision, whereas relational forms, which might be more difficult for adults to detect, occur more commonly in classrooms.
Despite these differences, there exist high correlations between the two forms of aggression and the two forms of victimization—children who enact high levels of one form tend to also enact high levels of the other, and children who are the victims of one form tend to also be the victims of the other. This has made it difficult for researchers to detect distinct antecedents or consequences of the different forms of aggression or victimization. In other words, the empirical evidence does not provide a clear picture of whether overt versus relational forms of aggression have distinct origins or outcomes, nor whether the victims of these two forms have distinct risk factors or consequences.
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Functions
Aggressive behavior can also be distinguished according to the function it serves. Most distinctions by function separate instrumental aggression from reactive aggression. Instrumental aggression (also called proactive aggression) is that which is intended to obtain resources or social status; for example, a child who pushes a peer in order to take a toy. Reactive aggression (also called defensive aggression) is a response, often in an angry, emotionally dysregulated manner, to a perceived offense or threat; for example, the child who throws a temper tantrum and hits a peer during a dispute.
There are two reasons that this distinction according to form is important. First, the two functions of aggressive behavior are believed to have distinct social-cognitive underpinnings. Instrumental aggression is believed (and there is empirical evidence to support this) to be driven by biases in the behaviors considered and evaluations of aggressive behaviors; for example, instrumentally aggressive children tend to believe that positive outcomes will result from aggression and value these outcomes obtained through aggressive behavior. Reactive aggression, on the other hand, is supported by biases in encoding and interpreting social information; for instance, reactively aggressive children tend to interpret others’ ambiguous behavior as hostile. A second reason this functional distinction is important is because instrumental aggression and reactive aggression are differentially related to maladjust-ment. Although both are associated with delinquent behavior, reactive aggression is more strongly related than instrumental aggression to internalizing problems (e.g., depression, anxiety), ADHD symptoms, low prosocial behaviors, and low peer status. It is worth noting that aggressive-only children more often enact instrumental aggression, whereas aggressive-victims more often enact reactive aggression, although the overlap between subgroup classification and functions of aggression is far from complete.
Although the distinction between instrumental and reactive aggression has been important in the study of aggressive children, there has been little attention to how the function of the aggression affects the victims. It seems plausible that distinct characteristics might place children at risk for victimization via instrumental versus reactive aggression, but these distinct risk factors have not been identified. It is also unclear whether victimization by instrumental versus reactive aggression predicts greater maladjustment.
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Relationship Contexts
Although researchers have typically considered the characteristics of aggressors and victims in isolation, there is an increasing awareness that aggression often occurs within specific aggressor-victim dyads (i.e., pairs in which a specific child aggresses against another specific child; for instance, Adam aggressing against Billy). For example, one group of researchers observed boys in small play groups and found that more than 50% of aggressive incidents occurred within just 20% of the dyads. These researchers also found that dyads in which aggression was evident on one day tended to be the same dyads that contained aggression on subsequent days. Together, these findings suggest the existence of aggressor-victim dyads in which aggression is especially frequent and persistent across time. The implication of this and related research is that a better understanding of aggression and victimization might be gained by considering the specific dyadic relationships of aggressors and victims.
Although there is very little research adapting this dyadic approach, the limited results demonstrate the importance of considering this relationship context. For instance, it has been found that aggression occurred more commonly within relationships based on mutual disliking (i.e., antipathetic relationships) than within friendships or acquaintanceships with neutral peers. Moreover, victimization within antipathetic relationships was more strongly predictive of maladjustment than was victimization within other relationships, suggesting that victimization within certain relationship contexts (i.e., antipathetic relationships) is more hurtful than victimization within other relationship contexts.
This focus on aggressor-victim relationships is relatively understudied, but it represents a fruitful approach for future research and consideration of occurrences of aggression. Several questions arise from such a consideration: Is there a differential in personal (e.g., physical strength) or social (e.g., popularity) power in aggressor-victim relationships, and does the amount of this power differential predict the form of aggression or outcomes for the aggressors or victims? To what extent are aggressor-victim relationships unidirectional or bidirectional in the enactment of aggression, and what characteristics of the individuals and relationship predict this directionality? Are aggressor-victim relationships relatively stable (i.e., the same aggressors targeting the same victims) or unstable (i.e., aggressors targeting different victims) over time, and what predicts this stability or instability? These questions represent just some that can be asked regarding aggressor-victim relationships; considering and answering these (and similar) questions represent important future directions for research and considerations for those working in applied settings.
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Future Directions
Aggression is a common phenomenon in children’s lives, resulting in serious maladjustment for both aggressors and victims. The evidence for this statement is conclusive, and the dismissal that such behaviors are just “kids being kids” is incorrect and arguably irresponsible.
Fortunately, research has identified several risk factors for aggression and victimization, providing a point of prevention or intervention for these pro-blems. Unfortunately, translation of this research into application has been rather slow, and the existing intervention efforts have not proven as effective as would be desired. The refinement and widespread implementation of effective prevention and intervention of aggressive behavior represents an important task of educational psychologists (indeed, all profes-sionals working with or studying children).
Part of the difficulty in developing effective interventions may be that for too long, aggression has been viewed as a homogeneous construct. Recent work has identified distinct forms and functions of aggression, as well as expanded consideration of the problem to one of an aggressor-victim relationship. Each of these approaches offers promise in better understanding and treating aggressors and victims.
Recognition and understanding of aggression and victimization holds much promise for reducing these problems. In schools where teachers are aware of school policies on aggressive behavior and have received training to deal with these problems, students tend to view teachers as more approachable and willing to take action and, more importantly, experience lower rates of aggression and peer victimization. In other words, the first, and perhaps most important, step is simply in recognizing the problem and resolving to do something about it.

Noel A. Card and Abha S. Rao

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

ALTERNATIVE ACADEMIC ASSESSMENT
Alternative academic assessment (AAA) is a class of procedures that are commonly used to assess student
Types Curriculum-Based Assessment
Most AAAs fall under the umbrella of CBA. The fundamental characteristics of CBA include that it (a) derives from, or is substantially similar to, the curriculum; (b) is linked to instruction; and (c) is used primarily to guide curriculum placement and instructional procedures. CBA procedures and instrumentation can be developed to assess skills within either a broad domain or a narrow domain.
CBA is divided into two subgroups: general outcome measures (GOMs) and subskill mastery measures (SMMs). GOMs are used to assess the level and rate of student achievement within a broad range of skills. GOMs are typically used to assess the achievement within the annual curriculum and instruction. A consistent set of procedures and instrumentation are used throughout the academic year. For example, mathematics computation in second grade might be assessed with tasks that span two-digit addition without carrying through four-digit subtraction with borrowing. The stimulus set and task demands are heterogeneous and representative of the annual curriculum. In contrast, SMMs are used to assess the level and rate of student achievement within a narrow range of skills and, usually, within a narrow range of time, which might be defined by an instructional unit. Procedures and instrumentation might change for each instructional unit so as to assess a specific and distinct set of skills that are aligned with the curriculum and instruction. For example, mathematics computation assessments might be narrowed to include only two-digit by two-digit subtraction without borrowing. The stimulus set and task demands are homogeneous and representative of the short-term instructional goal.
The variety of CBA procedures is broad. The following sections review a subset of available procedures. These include curriculum-based measurement, CBA for instructional design, criterion-referenced CBA, curriculum-based evaluation, and informal reading inventories. There are many other CBA procedures, which include end-of-chapter assessments that come along with curriculum materials. The selected procedures are a representative sample of those with the most prominence.
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Curriculum-Based Measurement
Curriculum-based measurement (CBM) is a standardized assessment procedure that is used to index the level and rate of academic growth in four basic skills: reading, mathematics, written expression, and spelling. CBM is generally classified as a GOM because it is used to assess student achievement within the annual curriculum. It is defined as stan-dardized procedure and not as a standardized test. This distinction is necessary because the instrumentation is not standard across applications.
CBM was developed by Stanley Deno and col-leagues in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. More than 200 research studies of CBM are published in peer-refereed journals, and technical development continues through the present day. CBM oral reading fluency (CBM-R) is the most prominent of the available procedures. In CBM-R, the student reads aloud for one minute as the administrator (usually the teacher) follows along on another copy of the passage. The administrator notes errors made and tallies up the number of words read correctly. This yields the student’s reading rate, which is reported in units of words read correctly per minute. Error rates and accuracy are also reported sometimes.
CBM was designed to serve as an “academic thermometer” to monitor students’ growth in four basic skill domains. The procedures are sometimes described as “dynamic indicators of basic skills.” CBM is dynamic in that assessment outcomes are useful to evaluate the effects of instruction over the short term. Outcomes are useful to guide either summative or formative decisions. Summative decisions require one-time evaluations of the level of academic achievement. Formative decisions require ongoing evaluations of the level and rate of academic achievement, which are usually evaluated to estimate the effects of instruction. CBM is an indicator in that it provides a general assessment of academic health within each domain. That is, although CBM-R yields outcomes in words read correctly per minute, that level of oral reading fluency is useful to estimate the general reading achievement and predict performance on large-scale assessments (e.g., statewide tests). CBM targets basic skills in that there are procedures in each of the four fundamental basic skill domains (reading, writing, math, and spelling).
Formative assessment can inform intervention and determine the effectiveness of an intervention. Here is an example: Nick, a second-grade student was referred to the school psychologist for low CBM scores in reading. Nick reads 30 words correctly per minute, compared to the expected 60 words per minute by second grade. The school psychologist or teacher implements an intervention of paired reading for half an hour a day. The following week, Nick completes another CBM at 35 words per minute. Now the discrepancy between Nick’s score and the expected score has decreased, signifying that Nick is responding to the intervention. If the discrepancy continues to decrease, Nick will continue with paired reading until he reads at the expected second-grade level. Should the discrepancy remain the same or increase, the intervention will be modified until the desired level of growth is achieved.
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CBA for Instructional Design
CBA for instructional design (CBA-ID) was developed to match the student to the appropriate instructional and curriculum level and focuses on individualizing instruction to ensure mastery learning of all students. A good instructional match maximizes student learning and engagement by fitting the student’s needs. Research has found that students are most successful when they are able to respond correctly to material 93% to 97% of the time. This is called the instructional level. CBA-ID starts by finding the student’s instructional level and then tests for areas of skill deficits.
CBA-ID has four steps. The first is to choose an appropriate passage for the student to read and test for the student’s instructional level by asking them to read 20 to 30 randomly chosen words from the passage. If the student gets five or fewer words wrong, then he or she moves on to the next step. If more than five errors are made, then the student is retested in a passage at a lower level. The second step requires the student to read the passage. As the student reads, the examiner records the student’s errors. Afterward, the student is asked questions about the passage to assess how well the student comprehends what he or she read. The last two steps of CBA-ID are to use the assessment information to match the student to appropriate reading instruction and curriculum. Progress monitoring continues as the student is instructed and necessary changes are made.
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Criterion-Referenced CBA
Criterion-referenced CBA (CR-CBA) is similar to CBA-ID in that it was developed to determine appropriate instructional materials and strategies. The methods differ, however, in that CBA-CR determines an acceptable level of performance by comparing student scores to a locally normed sample of average peers. Students are tested on items from the curriculum in order of easy to difficult within a reading series. The teacher or examiner constructs reading tests by using 100-word passages from the beginning, middle, and end of the reading series. Students are tested across 3 days on nine passages; three from the beginning, middle, and end each. As the student reads, the examiner records student errors and then calculates the student’s accuracy level (percentage of words read correctly across the entire 100-word passage) and rate of reading (the product of accuracy and 60 divided by total seconds it took the student to read the passage). Next, the student is asked six comprehension questions. Finally, the median scores for the 3 days of assessment are summarized. Assessment decisions are made based on the student’s performance compared to the mastery criteria.
Curriculum-Based Evaluation
Curriculum-based evaluation (CBE) is used to determine the student’s general whereabouts in the curriculum to identify specific areas of skill deficit. Administration begins with survey level assessment to identify if the student’s performance meets expected goals. The initial survey level assessment is developed by sampling a broad domain from the curriculum. In the case of reading, for example, broad skills such as decoding and comprehension are tested. If the results show that the student has a deficit, a skill-specific criterion-referenced test is administered. This second test focuses on specific skills such as segmenting words, rhyming, intonation, and other reading-related sub-skills. Results are used to adapt instruction to the student’s needs.
Informal Reading Inventories
Informal reading inventories (IRIs) are similar to CBE in that they identify specific subskill deficits. There is much variance among the increasing number of published IRIs; however, most follow a typical assessment method. First, the student is asked to read from a graded word list. Depending on the student’s accuracy, he or she moves up or down a grade level in word lists until the student’s instructional level is found. The definition of this level varies among IRIs but usually falls around 90% words read correctly. Second, the student reads a passage from his or her instructional level. As the student reads, the examiner records the student’s errors, or miscues. This yields the student’s accuracy and reading rate. Next, the miscues are grouped into categories like omissions, substitutions, low fluency words, and repetitions. Attention is also paid to the types of words that are miscued. This allows the examiner to identify specific areas of weakness. For example, a student may struggle with words with a silent e. IRIs determine not only which level of curriculum to place students in but also specific areas of weakness.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Advantages
Efficiency
The administration of AAAs is quick (taking as little as 1 minute) and requires few resources. Items can be developed easily by teachers and taken right from the curriculum. Furthermore, AAAs require little training to administer or score. Also, because they are flexible and can be designed to assess specific domains of academics, AAAs allow school psychologists and other educators to test specific assessment questions rather than routinely test across a broad number of academic domains.
Use of Local Norms
Performances on AAA are often interpreted with reference to local normative data. Local norms are developed from samples of student behavior using AAA procedures. Local norms directly represent the school district population, academic goals, and outcomes rather than the performance of students nationwide. They also decrease the likelihood of bias in decision making because they are representative of student age, grade, race, educational background, and socioeconomic status.
Another advantage of local norms is that there is greater overlap between what is taught and what is tested. Districts have the flexibility to design comparative data based on the specific curriculum. This high teaching-testing overlap yields more meaningful data on student progress. CBM-R is the most common alternative academic assessment that is used to create local norms. In many districts, students complete CBM-Rs in the fall, winter, and spring.
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Benchmarking
Benchmarks are sometimes used to evaluate student performance with a criterion-referenced interpretation.
Both benchmarks and local norms are used as referents to evaluate whether students are making adequate progress to achieve expected long-term goals. For example, if students are expected to read 60 words correctly per minute in CBM-R by spring of first grade, then by winter, it is likely they should read 45 words correctly per minute. A student who scores significantly lower than the winter benchmark is identified as at-risk. The student is then given additional help so that by spring, he or she achieves the targeted level of performance. Benchmarking provides information that will help in determining which students are at risk and should be monitored more closely. To this end, benchmarking is also a vital component of prevention. It allows educators to identify and fix small problems before they become larger.
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Utility Within the Problem-Solving Model
Historically, students were placed in special education based on their scores on large norm-referenced tests (the “test and place” model). An intelligence score below a certain criterion resulted in a label such as “learning disabled.” The student was then matched to special education services based on that label, and the problem was viewed as an inherent trait within the student. Beginning in 2001, a shift has occurred away from the traditional model and toward the problem-solving model.
The problem-solving model focuses not on traits of the student but on environmental and situational factors that can be modified to increase student outcomes. The problem-solving model follows these steps: identify the problem, measure the severity of problem, explore possible interventions, implement an intervention, and measure progress in hopes that the student can be successful in the general education setting. The problem-solving model is a circular process, as progress is constantly being monitored and interventions are adjusted accordingly. The problem-solving model does not rely on unproven inferences as does the traditional model. Hypotheses are continually tested and monitored with AAAs. Thus, decisions are evidence-based because student data are considered when creating and modifying interventions.
AAAs provide the necessary tools to implement the problem-solving model, as they efficiently assess student performance and can be repeated often. As the popularity of the problem-solving model increases, so does that of AAAs.
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Utility for Progress Monitoring
Alternative academic assessments not only identify students who are at-risk but also determine if intervention efforts are successful. Because they are efficient and drawn directly from the curriculum, AAAs can be used repeatedly to monitor student progress and response to intervention. Repeated measures provide not only the level of performance but also the student’s rate of growth. This allows educators to determine if the student is making adequate improvement or not. If the intervention does not produce the desired rate of growth, then changes are made to the intervention.

Theodore James Christ and Sarah Scullin

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

The 21 st Century
Today, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the First Nations are a young population as compared with other ethnicities, with just less than half living on a reservation or federal trust land and a little more than half living in urban areas. First Nations persons are overrepresented within the numbers of negative social and economic indicators of disparity. Though rates vary widely between tribes and geographic regions, the First Nations find themselves with many of the most disparaging statistical measures of societal success. Economically, they lag behind other ethnic populations, having high poverty and unemployment rates and disproportionately low educational opportunities and graduation rates at all levels. Physical health disparities include high rates of diabetes and heart disease. Mental and behavioral health disparities include depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and alcohol abuse for the First Nations as a whole.
First Nations children and youth receive disproportionately low levels of prenatal care as compared with other populations. They are exposed to alcohol in utero at higher rates and thus suffer rates of fetal alcohol syndrome disproportionately. As a group, First Nations youth endure disproportionate rates of diabetes, obesity, inner ear infection, cancer, and toxin exposure. The lack of accessible culturally competent health care compounds the negative impact on First Nations health. Suicide and homicide are among the top 10 causes of death for First Nations youth ages 5 through 14 years, and loss and grief follow this young population as a whole, given the historical and persistent struggles with which it is faced. Emerging public health issues for the First Nations include high rates of pregnancy for young women and girls who have insufficient access to prenatal care, escalating rates of sexually transmitted disease (including HIV/AIDS), and an explosion of gang involvement, even in reservation areas.
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Health, Resiliency, and the Balance way
The disparities and impacts of coloniztion with which many First Nations struggle is best conceptualized through an Indigenous worldview. The situation then becomes historically bound and has been framed by First Nations elders and tradition keepers as transcending time in a spatial fashion and experienced both individually and collectively. Thus, historical events are experienced in real time by individuals and their communities. Healing occurs through communal support and recognition of suffering and ritual interventions. In this way, suffering is acknowledged by the individual and his or her support system, and assessment, diagnosis, and treatment occur via a vehicle that emphasizes both individual and group strategies. First Nations scholars and clinicians advocate for an intervention framework that recognizes the inter- and multigenera-tional nature of the loss, stress, and trauma to which American Indians and Alaska Natives are exposed. Such a framework is congruent with the First Nations concept of time and healing and draws upon the use of traditional concepts and strategies.
Assessment, Diagnosis, and Treatment: First Nations Values and Ancient Knowledge
Despite the breath of diversity within the First Nations population, pan-cultural values and worldview perspectives exist. One commonly held view is that of time as cyclical and spatial versus linear, as conceived by the mainstream. Emphasis is on process rather than product. Contextual space or environment is often closely tied with experience and thus with healing. The First Nations see all as connected, whether celestial, elemental, mineral, fauna, animal, or human. Relationships are not compartmentalized along blood lines but rather viewed as broad connections that invoke relational roles. For example, siblings and cousins may be seen as equivalent relationships for an individual, and both will be referred to as brothers or sisters. In this spatial worldview, conceptions of wellness and ill health, life and death are grounded in the idea of keeping balance internally and with the world around one’s self, and moving from one time-space domain to the next, respectively. Traditional healers utilize place (e.g., sacred locations) and integrate the help of other elements (e.g., plants, animals) to aid in helping the indi-vidual rebalance. Given the value placed on process and the cyclical nature of existence, all human experiences are held as important. Events such as dreams, visions, and premonitions are integrated into the healing process and not pathologized in the vein of mainstream psychology. Traditionally, there is a broad acceptance of difference and individual diversity, and thus a strategy of relative noninterference exists. Persons are supported through change individually with a healer and/or communally, and they are encouraged to find their own path to meaning and balance, utilizing their own gifts and strengths in doing so. This idea of individual difference and noninterference is quite divergent from mainstream thinking and is particularly evident in mainstream socially constructed concepts, such as that of gender or sexual orientation/preference. Pan-culturally, First Nations persons traditionally view gender as discrete from sexual orientation, identity, and preference.
Given the historical context within which the fields of psychology and education have developed and the current statistics the First Nations face, it is clear that pervasive cultural competence is lacking in assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of this population. Stereotyping, stigma, and discrimination pervade the intervention process with the First Nations and are highly correlated with low rates of contact and retention within the helping professions. Clinicians must consider the possibility of institutional distrust on the part of First Nations clients. Accommodation must be made for cultural differences present between the client and the clinician as well as between the client and the system of service. Language can pose a particular roadblock to intervention, regardless of whether the client speaks English as a second or a first language. Previous generations pass down the cultural worldview housed in Indigenous languages. First Nations languages are relational and descriptive in nature and do not accommodate compartmentalization as English does. Most Indigenous languages provide an understanding of the world as either animate or inanimate, not living or dead. Gendered language too is relatively nonexistent in the fashion of Western-mainstream languages. A close examination of popular standardized assessment and diagnostic tools quickly reveals their inability to competently accommodate First Nations clients. The vast majority of such tools, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth Edition, Text Revision) (DSM-W-TR), have been developed through a linear, White mainstream worldview, and few have been standardized or explored in relationship to their use with the First Nations.
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Learning: indigenous Science and Knowledge Acquisition
American Indians and Alaska Natives have had sophisticated systems of hypothesis testing and knowledge acquisition for thousands of years. This knowledge has persisted in oral, written, pictorial, and ritual traditions. Unfortunately, systemic racism, discrimination, and ignorance have all played a role in the perpetuation of the stereotype of First Nations science as a proto-knowledge, a less sophisticated form of Western-mainstream constructs. It is in this atmosphere that First Nations persons are educated by mainstream institutions of learning. Acculturation and assimilation pressures are significant for First Nations children in educational settings and persist through higher education.
Preschoolers may encounter difficulties adjusting to their new setting and its demands. Traditionally, First Nations youth are raised with close attention to attachment building and may share a bed with their primary caretaker(s), may be breastfed until they are 3 or 4 years old, and may enjoy the attention of multiple caretakers regardless of blood ties. Children entering ele-mentary school are often encountering mainstream culture for the first time and can be shaken by the shift in worldviews within which they must function. Boys may be ridiculed for keeping their hair traditionally long, and all youth are subject to defending themselves against the onslaught of holidays and practices celebrated in school systems that may be Christian-focused or U.S. nationalist. Language issues can be a particular challenge, and children may be required to shift from an experientially based traditional educational focus at home to a more linear, prescribed learning style in the educational setting. By middle and high school, First Nations youth often confront the full force of stereotyping and discrimination, as well as the aforementioned risk factors. They may encounter existential crises, struggling to integrate traditional spiritual beliefs with mainstream culture. The risk for internalized oppression is great, as teens strive for identity and self-preservation. A traditional adolescent may attend a school that promotes stereotyping and demeans the spiritual worldview of First Nations persons via Indian mascots or the promotion of, and forced participation in, Christian-based activities. This pressure mounts as those First Nations youth who do graduate from high school attempt to make their way to college. College students may have to travel great distances from their tribal communities and lands, deepening existential struggles. In higher education they find few First Nations mentors, little funding, and can struggle greatly to resolve the rift between their traditional worldview and that of the Western mainstream.
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Indigenizing the Mainstream
Best practices with American Indians and Alaska Natives mandate the integration of traditional knowledge, practices, community, and tradition keepers. Successful strategies and programs are individualized and recognize the potential for divergent worldviews and diversity within this group. Legitimate ways of knowing and healing are held within the First Nations culture and have been utilized for thousands of years to educate and heal this group. The educational psychologist will find a wealth of helpers within the commu-nity’s natural supportive structure. Elders, traditional healers and mentors, extended family, and many others can be of assistance for case conceptualization and treatment. Traditional knowledge and values can be found in a group’s original instructions (creation story) and provide a useful framework for conceptualizing a client’s struggle, as well as his or her ethnic identity. Finally, policies that support the integration of understanding between the mainstream and First Nations may be supported by educational psychology as socially just objectives that promote healing and understanding for both groups.
Leah M. Rouse Arndt

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.