Achievement Oriented: Developing Positive Academic Identities for Girl Students at an Urban School

Abstract

The link between noncognitive skills and achievement is well established. There is much less evidence on how these skills are developed and transmitted to students, especially as it relates to girls that attend nonelite schools in non-Western settings. Drawing on insights from girl students attending an urban school in Ghana, this paper illustrates the role of school contexts in facilitating the development of noncognitive skills, namely, achievement-oriented identities—positive beliefs in one’s own ability and the translation of those beliefs into realizable actions. These identities act as useful tools for navigating the gender-specific challenges that impede girls’ abilities to achieve. These findings have implications for research on gender, noncognitive skills, and educational achievement in developing and developed societies.

Keywords

educational achievement school context gender noncognitive skills

Introduction

Increasingly, education studies emphasize the important role of noncognitive skills, such as “grit” and “perseverance,” or the development of social and cultural identities and ideologies on the overall success of students (Coleman, 1988; DiMaggio, 1982; Lareau & Weininger, 2003; Lee & Shute, 2010; Ogbu, 1985). Noncognitive skills can be defined as any trait, quality, characteristic, or factor that can contribute to academic achievement but is traditionally left unmeasured on standardized exams.¹ One potential mechanism for the development of noncognitive skills is the school context. In fact, Dweck, Walton, and Cohen (2011) ask, “Is it something about [the students] or is it something about the school?” (p. 2).

Earlier studies on disadvantaged students (as denoted by parents’ low socioeconomic status [SES]) that attend elite schools show that educational settings might mediate the effects of low SES on educational outcomes. While these studies indicate that students are more likely to demonstrate noncognitive skills if schools create environments that facilitate their development, it remains unclear how educational settings contribute to the development of noncognitive skills (Griffin & Alexander, 1978; Raudenbush & Bryk, 1986). Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is even less clarity on the applications of these findings to non-male students who are not from elite schools or developed countries (Dei, 2011; Dweck et al., 2011).

Indeed, multiple developing societies face significantly different sociocultural contexts, particularly in terms of gender, as represented from developed countries. While girls in the United States outnumber boys in educational enrollment, particularly at the college level, girls in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, remain 50% less likely than boys to finish primary school. Theoretically, the development of noncognitive skills can contribute to the reduction of gender disparities in education. Duckworth and Seligman (2005), for example, suggest that school discipline shapes girls’ high performance in school relative to boys. Yet we know very little about how one would expect these skills to operate contexts where the gender gap favors boys. This suggests the need to contextualize understandings of how noncognitive skills contribute to educational achievement in much more specific ways.

To address these gaps, this paper utilizes original data collected between 2009 and 2012 on the educational experiences of girls attending an urban school in Ghana. These data illustrate how noncognitive skills can be instilled in girl students through a focus on the role of the school context. I demonstrate how various aspects of the school’s structure—at the leadership level, in the classroom, and after school—contribute to the development of what I title achievement-oriented identities (AOIs), defined as positive beliefs in one’s own ability and the translation of those beliefs into realizable actions. I focus on how these identities shape students’ confidence, discipline, and faith, thereby acting as protective factors, or tools, that help girls succeed.

The rest of the paper is divided into the following sections. The first section of the paper provides a brief review of the role of noncognitive skills in studies on educational achievement. The next section examines how schools transmit noncognitive skills through the construction of academic identities. This section is followed by a brief historical background on education in Ghana, the location of the field site used for the analysis. The following section describes the methodology used to conduct the study, including selection of the school, data collection and analysis, and findings derived from that analysis. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of these findings and additional considerations for future research.

The Importance of Noncognitive Skills for Educational Achievement

While scholars of educational achievement repeatedly show that both economic factors (e.g., parents’ income) and sociocultural factors (e.g., parents’ value for education) are significant drivers of student achievement (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Davis-Kean, 2005; Kerckhoff, Raudenbush, & Glennie, 2001; Sewell & Hauser, 1975), an interdisciplinary body of work demonstrates that noncognitive skills can also contribute significantly to educational achievement (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007; Farkas, 2003; Heckman, Stixrud, & Urzua, 2006; Wolfe & Johnson, 1995). For example, educational psychologists have shown that a student’s grade point average (GPA) is a better predictor of life success than more traditional measures such as IQ, primarily due to its relationship with noncognitive skills such as academic tenacity (Farkas, 2003).²

Similarly, a recent and well-known study of noncognitive skills among 90 New York City pupils found that those who thought intelligence was malleable—or rather, had “growth mindsets”—performed better academically, as measured by GPA, than those who thought intelligence was fixed (Dweck, 2006). Other studies have shown that students scoring high on measures of traits such as “grit,” “perseverance,” and “self-discipline” have, on average, better academic outcomes, also measured by GPA, than those who score low on these same traits (Bowen, Chingos, & McPherson, 2009; Duckworth & Seligman, 2005; Walton & Cohen, 2007).³

Sociologists have demonstrated how noncognitive skills—in the form of social and cultural capital—are learned early on from one’s home and familial environment and rewarded by the educational institution through its grading and testing practices (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; DiMaggio, 1982; Dumais, 2002). For instance, Bowles and Gintis (1976) demonstrate how schools instill skills and traits that produce good citizens for the workplace. These studies emphasize how institutions reward students by constructing certain actions and skills as legitimate (see also Lareau & Weininger, 2003). Collectively, the range of studies described previously reveal that focusing on noncognitive skills, whether related to academic tenacity, grit, and/or social and cultural capital, provides a productive lens by which to examine and understand student achievement.

How School Context Shapes Positive Academic Identities

While the aforementioned studies provide clear evidence that noncognitive skills contribute to educational achievement, less clear is how these skills may be developed and transmitted to students (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007; Farrington et al., 2012; Gutman & Schoon, 2013; Walton & Cohen, 2007). In this regard, one commonly proposed pathway is through the strategic use of the school context. Despite the multiple experimental and intervention-based methods that are discussed, especially in psychology, as potential strategies to be utilized by schools, this paper focuses on the ways in which one kind of school contributes to the construction of academic identities—a type of social identity.⁴

Most notably, studies that focus on minority students in the United States illustrate how they often must take on multiple identities—personal and academic—to achieve at similar levels to their majority peers (Flores-González, 2002; Mehan, Hubbard, & Villanueva, 1994; Warikoo & Carter, 2009). For instance, Mehan et al. (1994) convincingly demonstrate how African American and Latino youth in the United States form academically oriented peer groups and strategies for managing the multiple identities they take on at home as well as school. The researchers attribute the development of these identities and the related management strategies to schools’ ability to develop a critical consciousness among their students. This critical consciousness enables students to “believe in their own efficacy and the power of schooling to change their lives” (p. 97). The researchers also note that these students “do not adopt a romantic or naïve commitment” (p. 97) to the ideology. Rather, students adopt such beliefs as a pragmatic response to the respective barriers they face. The students’ belief in themselves and the role of the school in generating these beliefs demonstrate how identity is constructed by schools and utilized among minority youth to achieve (Buckley & Carter, 2005).⁵

Although the educational setting is thought to be crucial for the development of these identities, scholars have primarily relied on evidence from comparisons of achievement among low- and high-achieving students at elite institutions and/or in developed countries (see Duckworth et al., 2007; Duckworth & Seligman, 2005; Fuller & Clarke, 1994). Yet students at nonelite institutions in developing countries also must learn to navigate straddling identities based on their gender and relative economic disadvantage. Still, we know very little about how nonelite institutions in developing nations, particularly those nations where gender roles may be relatively more restrictive than those of developed nations, can contribute to the educational achievement of their students, especially girls. In short, there is a need to understand how positive academic identities operate outside of the geographical and sociocultural contexts in which they are typically studied.

Enabling Academic Success Through Achievement-Oriented Identities

Utilizing the results of a multiyear and multimethod research study conducted in Ghana, a sub-Saharan West African country, this paper seeks to fill these gaps. The paper focuses on the institutional arrangements—school leadership, afterschool peer networks, and nonacademic curricula of religious and moral education—that foster the development of what I call achievement-oriented identities among girl students. Broadly, I use the term achievement-oriented identities to capture the ways in which the academic context contributes to the formation of positive “beliefs”—ways of thinking—and encourages the translation of those beliefs into realizable actions through an emphasis on confidence, discipline, and faith.

More specifically, the concept is concerned with how the social structure of a school can influence students’ identity and subsequent behavior (see e.g., Stryker & Serpe, 1982). I demonstrate that the various components of schools as institutions create a socializing structure that produces identities—multiple parts of self—that are absorbed by the students who attend the school. These identities are used by students for developing their worldview on and strategies toward achievement.

As stated by Stets and Burke (2003),

The overall self is organized into multiple parts (identities), each of which is tied to aspects of the social structure. One has an identity, or rather an “internalized positional designation” . . . for each of the different positions or role relationships the person holds in society. (p. 7)

They go on to state that “when one claims an identity in an interaction with others, there is an alternative identity claimed by another to which it is related” (p. 7). As mentioned previously, this type of identity claiming can be seen especially in established works on the achievement of minorities in the United States (Luttrell, 2003; Mehan et al., 1994).

Just as Mehan et al. (1994) convincingly illustrate how African American and Latino youth form academically oriented peer groups and strategies for managing the multiple identities they take on at home versus at school, I argue that this type of identity sharing—defined as the ability to move from one identity to another identity—is particularly relevant for students. For example, religion may promote values such as hard work and self-belief regardless of obstacles, but it is also often used to promote female submission and reconfirm gender stereotypes. Accordingly, a successful student must know how to traverse the conflicting spaces between faith and achievement. This same conflict applies to public and private (home and school life) settings. For example, a girl student may want to promote herself as a “school girl,”⁶ but she may need to balance that desire with the reality that such values may be inconsistent with that which is respected at home. Accordingly, it may be in her best interest not to promote her school-girl status when with the family if she wants to be able to continue to go to school. The previous example highlights how the academic successes of girl students in some developing contexts may depend on their ability to strategically navigate between two seemingly contradictory worlds. And as this study aims to demonstrate, school structure, through the development of AOIs, can play an important role in enabling students to navigate these challenges and achieve.

AOIs are not reflective of any single trait, such as self-control. Rather, they are a belief set around a positive view of life’s challenges and one’s individual capacity to overcome them through confidence, discipline, and faith. The school context acts as the central source for providing students with the practical and emotional tools useful for doing this. More specifically, the school context becomes achievement oriented, and this achievement-oriented context impresses on students a positive academic identity. Evidence of this context can be observed through the intentional actions of teachers and school leaders in addition to the planned activities conducted throughout the typical school day. The context’s influence on its students can be observed through the goals students express as necessary to achieve as well as the proactive strategies they take on in response to their challenges. Across various scenarios, AOIs essentially act as protective tools for helping girls succeed. The rest of the paper highlights how schools contribute to the development of AOIs among girl students by focusing on the case of Ghana.

The Case of Ghana

Ghana serves as a compelling case to examine educational achievement in the developing world due to its enactment of equitable education policies and its continued disparities in educational outcomes, particularly as it relates to gender. In 1957, Ghana became the first African country south of the Sahara to gain independence from British colonial rule. Shortly after, in 1961, Ghana became the first African nation to provide universal education under its Education Act. This effort, while fair in theory, was unfortunately unfair in practice. As the nation faced multiple political and financial challenges, various identifiable groups found themselves excluded from acquiring a formal education despite the promise of free education for all (Akyeampong, 2009). When the new republic was established in 1992, an equal rights amendment was included in the constitution, establishing what came to be known as Free and Compulsory Universal Basic Education. It was only then that the number of girls attending school began to increase significantly. These state policies—in tandem with a number of international policies, such as those included in the Millennium Development Goals and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the development of local government agencies such as the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs—have created space for what seems to be changing societal perspectives on women in Ghana.

With regard to education in recent years, Ghana boasts near gender parity at the primary level, with nearly 90% of the country’s population attaining at least basic education (UNICEF, 2013). Yet as education levels rise, there are significant drops in enrollment, particularly among girl students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.⁷ Financial means and gendered responsibilities play significant roles in the ability of girl students to pass into higher levels of education.

In terms of finances, while public schools are technically free, schools typically charge students fees for various services, including registration, books, and supplies, thereby making even government-subsidized schools still relatively unaffordable for some. These fees increase at higher levels of education, which can contribute to the increased dropout rate of girls. Once girls gain access to schools, remaining enrolled becomes challenging because they often bear more responsibility at home, such as needing to walk several miles to fetch water before school and needing to engage in multiple hours of housework after school compared with their male peers. For this reason, when parents are faced with financial hardship and must choose which of their children should stay in school, they opt to consider boys over their female siblings.

Even within the classroom, girls face challenges unique to their gender. For example, in selecting an academic track for students, many teachers in Ghana still hold outdated views about girl students’ capacity to perform in certain disciplines. Consequently, girl students are funneled into the arts or home sciences even if they have the aptitude to pursue traditionally male-dominant subjects such as math and science (Assié-Lumumba, 2006). A lack of interest in their assigned academic track can lead girl students to lose interest in school altogether.

Another more recent concern is that of male teachers and administrators pursuing sexual relationships with girl students as well as the increasing existence of what one expert I interviewed called STGs, or sexually transmitted grades, in which a girl student is asked for a sexual favor in exchange for accurate reporting of her academic work. Therefore, even though more girls are attending higher levels of school, they are also increasingly facing sexual harassment in the classroom. Another factor is that teachers are predominantly male, and in Ghana, girls are often afraid to protest their male authority figures (Alderman & King, 1998).

Despite recent developments in public policy, girls in Ghana continue to operate under the context of patriarchal hierarchies and traditional gender norms. Thus, the potential for a girl to achieve in Ghana is not only related to gaining educational access but also to developing the capacity to navigate everyday societal barriers based on gender, a dilemma that may be solved with the enhancement of noncognitive skills.

Scholarship in Developing Societies on Noncognitive Skills and Achievement

Nonetheless, very little scholarship has explored the relationship between noncognitive skills and educational achievement in Ghana and other developing societies. In a study on noncognitive skills and achievement conducted in 2010, policy researcher George Frempong found that confidence levels rather than the location or quality of the school explained the disparate outcomes in achievement between students from low- and high-education backgrounds in Ghana. He found these results to be especially strong among the girl students sampled, suggesting that confidence, a noncognitive skill, is more critical for achievement than typically studied factors such as parental education level and school quality (Frempong, 2010). The findings indicate that the teaching of noncognitive skills, particularly to girls, might help close the educational achievement gap in Ghana. Nonetheless, virtually no studies have been conducted in Ghana to further support this.

Researching school-aged girls in Malawi, sociologist Margaret Frye (2012) utilized in-depth interviews and archival data to illustrate the ways in which schools, development organizations, and the media espouse an ideological rhetoric of a “brighter future” that encourages an inflated sense of one’s chances of educational achievement and life success despite disadvantages faced by girl students. Frye explained this disconnection as attributable to a morality-laden perspective in which girls evaluate themselves based on their ability to be virtuous women. These virtue-based claims contribute to confident perceptions of self as able to succeed, regardless of one’s social and economic background, and are critical for facilitating positive attitudes toward achievement.

Altogether, these studies point to the potential importance of studying noncognitive skills across different groups and contexts. Yet they fail to seriously engage with the gender barriers faced by girls, despite the continued importance of gender in understanding the achievement gap. This is where AOIs come in. Unlike traditional literature on noncognitive skills, this concept requires first, an understanding of the specific inhibitors or achievement barriers faced by girls and second, a focused effort on developing their self-confidence by providing them with tools to respond to challenges.

Data, Methods, and Strategies for Analysis

For this study, I conduct a targeted investigation of educational achievement among girl students that attended a government-subsidized school in the urban capital of Accra, Ghana, between 2009 and 2011. I call this school Academy Prep Secondary School (APSS). The school was selected because its demographic makeup, and academic performance was representative of a typical urban school in Ghana. At the time of my study, APSS had more than 1,000 students and a gender ratio of 60 males to 40 females. More than 80% of its students lived within a 10- to 15-mile radius of the campus, and nearly 75% came from low-income backgrounds, defined in Ghana as earning $2 or less per day (between 100 and 350 Ghana Cedis per month; Cooke, Hague, & McKay, 2016).

Data and Methods

In Year 1, I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with random students in their third year of high school (n = 37), five of which were males. I also conducted multiple interviews with the headmistress and assistant headmaster (also known as a principal or headteacher). Each interview lasted at least 30 minutes. In the interviews, I asked students questions about the social and educational context of Ghana, the challenges they experience, and the specific strategies needed to overcome them. I also collected in-depth observational data over a three-month period on the school’s various activities (e.g., morning prayer, school government) to better understand the school culture and how students operated within that environment.

In the second year of my study, I returned to the school and conducted follow-up interviews with nearly half of the original students.⁸ I asked many of the same questions. I also continued to collect observational data on the various activities occurring before, during, and after school. I then returned to Ghana one year later for one month to closely follow the home lives and post–high school experiences of 12 of the girl students examined in the second and third years of my study as they prepared for their next steps. For the investigation, I secured permission from both the state and regional education board office and the institution and guardian(s) of the students examined. Fortunately, the students and their families were comfortable with me in part due to my Ghanaian heritage and resultant familiarity with the local culture, customs, and language.⁹

Model

For the analysis, I adopted a framework from Farrington et al. (2012) for how noncognitive factors affect academic performance and behavior within a classroom/school and its larger sociocultural context. As stated by Farrington et al.,

Any given school and classroom context will reflect a wide variety of variables affecting student motivation and opportunity to learn. For example, how supports are made available and to whom, grading structures and policies, available course tracks, the nature of academic tasks students are asked to do, the relationship among student peers and their orientation towards work. (p. 12)

For the purposes of this study, I focus on the link between school/classroom context and academic mindsets. The classroom and context section also account for student background characteristics such as parental income and education level. These characteristics are expected to affect every aspect of the model. Furthermore, classrooms consist of multiple individuals that also create peer effects, and these peer effects operate within a larger school and sociocultural context. Most importantly for this investigation, the model accounts for the fact that the school context can intentionally and even unintentionally facilitate the construction of protective factors against potential inhibitors, because of one’s background, through the development of interventions and/or alternative strategies. Collectively, the aforementioned factors directly shape the construction of an academic mindset and thus the behaviors and performance of the student.

Using this framework, I demonstrate how students from a specific sociocultural context (a patriarchal one) and a specific type of background (a disadvantaged one, as defined by income and gender) develop positive academic mindsets and proactive strategies to navigate their educational experiences, facilitated in part by the school context.

Analysis: Coding and Interpretation of Data

For the analysis of the interviews and observations, I divide the data between students’ beliefs about what it takes to achieve and the role the school context plays in contributing to the participants’ perceptions and subsequent actions. In examining the students’ beliefs about what it takes to achieve, I used deductive and inductive methods to identify general themes, patterns, and trends in the data collected (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995; Miles & Huberman, 1994). As displayed in Figure 1, I looked for contributors to an academic mindset—the attitudes or beliefs one has about oneself in relation to academic work—through evidence of statements such as, “I belong in this community, I can succeed at this”; effortful control—the ability to delay gratification, exercise self-discipline and self-control, and manage emotions—through evidence of statements such as, “I exert the will to look beyond my short-term concerns to longer term or higher order goals”; and strategy—the ability to define goals and plans and enact and monitor them—through evidence of statements such as, “I know where I am, where I am going, and how to get unstuck.”

Figure 1.

A path diagram on achievement-oriented identities.

I present the results of a process whereby I initially coded the data into a set of categories and then recoded the data into an expanded and more refined set of categories based on what students said (Emerson et al., 1995). The terms discipline, confidence, and faith were found to be most reflective of the primary traits students viewed as critical to their achievement. These terms align with the characteristics of effortful control, academic mindset, and strategy, which the school sought to promote for the development of positive attitudes. Thus, the latter reflect the external skills promoted by the school, and the former reflect how students internalized them. Evidence of these characteristics combined are what I view as embodying AOIs.

In examining the school’s role, I looked for evidence of factors that contribute either positively or negatively to these identities. More specifically, I assessed the activities within the school (i.e., classroom) that affirmed or contradicted these perceptions. This process resulted in the identification of school leadership, afterschool peer networks, and religious and moral education as important areas to focus on for understanding the ways in which school context interacts with students’ academic mindsets to produce AOIs. It is important to note that at the time of the study, many of the girls I worked with represented the first generation in their family to reach the secondary school level. Before then, once girls completed primary school, only those who could afford to enroll in single sex schools, which were reserved for the children of the elite, continued their education. These elite schools were essentially legacies of colonialism (Kenway et al., 2017). Today, although wealthier girls are still constrained by the larger sociocultural context, they enjoy class privileges (even if only slightly) that their poor peers do not have. Thus, one might expect AOIs to have less of an impact on girls who are relatively privileged because they have access to alternative resources. Yet much more work needs to be done on this topic to verify that supposition.

For now, the rest of this paper will use the data referenced previously to discuss the results of the investigation. I start by discussing the social and ideological context facing students at APSS. I then discuss how the sociocultural context interacts with the personal backgrounds of the students before delving into the role of the school in mediating the social and individual effects through the promotion of a combination of skills—most notably, confidence, discipline, and faith—that together create a type of AOI.

Empirical Findings: The Social, Individual, and School Context Facing Girls at APSS

Sociocultural Context

Girls and women in Ghana operate in a patriarchal environment in which the expectations for men and women differ. In the words of one student at APSS, “in Ghana they think the office of the lady is the kitchen.” Since schools are often microcosms of greater societal relations, it is no surprise that these same challenges related to gender are found at the school level as well. As one student stated, “girls drop out because of pregnancies and other things.” Certainly, the ability to get pregnant creates a concern that is specific to the girls in the school, as explained by another girl student:

See he is a guy . . . he can’t get pregnant, but he can impregnate someone. Yet, still he can move around, but you are a lady. If you should get pregnant before your marriage age in Ghana it is something else.

The quote illustrates girl students’ perceptions of the unequal burden shared between girls and boys in terms of the potential consequences of getting pregnant after engaging in sex before one’s “marriage age.” While the boy “can move around,” the girl is constrained by the pregnancy and the social norms tied to being “a lady.” A plethora of literature highlights how pregnant schoolgirls are often demonized and thus viewed as deviants due to societal expectations for girls’ behavior (Kelly, 2000; Luttrell, 2003; Pillow, 2004). These clear gender biases are compounded by the poverty that these girls also experience in their neighborhoods and consequently at their neighborhood schools.

Background Characteristics of the Students

Indeed, most students that attend APSS are from disadvantaged neighborhoods. One student, 17 years old, described her home environment:

I grew up very young. [In the] Zungo, you have to work before you survive. People are not going to school, and when they see you alone leaving in a uniform to school they tend to laugh at you. . . . I wasn’t brought up with a golden spoon in my mouth . . . and my mother. A mother is supposed to be loving too. But I don’t have that relationship with my mother. She said I resemble my dad, and they broke up, and so all of the hatred is on me . . . and my father . . . I no longer hear from him.

The previous response indicates that the student not only is from a challenging neighborhood but also lacks support from her absent father and the one whom she believes should be the most “loving too”—her mother. As a result, she does not benefit from a traditional familial structure or support system. Other students echoed these challenges in their familial life, as another girl student stated,

I grew up with my mother and father, but my father passed and money was tight . . . so I had to come and stay with my aunt. Ahh, I really wouldn’t describe her as a mother . . . I can’t really talk to her like a mother. We don’t really have that type of relationship. My auntie, she doesn’t give me money to buy books.

Here, the student acknowledges the constraints of her home environment: Because she does not have a traditional mother-like relationship with her aunt, she is unable to secure the resources necessary to achieve, such as books. The previous quotes represent clear examples of the resource-poor and nontraditional familial backgrounds shared by girls at APSS. In fact, 45% of the students examined came from single-parent homes and 75% from low-income households.

The School Context and Its Gendered Challenges

Like students that attend public schools across urban cities in the United States, girls at APSS bring these challenges into school with them. Indeed, established literature in education has demonstrated the many ways in which the urban neighborhood context in the United States contributes to the social disorganization of its schools (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Kozol, 2012). The same applies in the context of Ghana, and it is strongly applicable to APSS.

APSS was historically located in one of Accra’s poorest neighborhoods. In describing the state of the school and its reputation, the assistant headmaster of APSS explained,

Being surrounded by some settlements . . . the squatters, they pose difficulty for us . . . they open liquor shops, sell drugs. [APSS] is more or less a community school, we have a number of satellite communities surrounding us and we are a day school so those who cannot afford a boarding school send their kids to us.

Unsurprisingly, when asked to describe their perceptions of the school, many of the students responded negatively. One student stated, for example, “I didn’t like the school because of the bad perception I had of the school. People were like the kids were bad.” Another student exclaimed, “this is [APSS], the most stubborn school in Ghana, the most notorious, the most in-disciplined [sic].” By describing the school as “stubborn” and “notorious” and as the school where parents send their kids when they cannot afford boarding school, these students reveal that APSS is not a school one wants to attend if they have any other choice. It is equally unsurprising, then, that many of the students are from poor neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, girl students face even more challenges once enrolled in school. As mentioned previously, girls in Ghana must contend with several prejudices made due to their gender, there often being a general misunderstanding of the value of higher education for their sex, which in turn influences the selection of academic tracks for girls, among other consequences. APSS students must confront these issues at almost every level of the school—in leadership, in the classroom, and during afterschool activities.

As literature on noncognitive skills and achievement has demonstrated, traits such as academic tenacity, grit, perseverance, resilience, and self-discipline can play a significant role in defeating the dismal circumstances that disadvantaged students tend to face (Duckworth et al., 2007; Duckworth & Seligman, 2005). Indeed, given students’ objective backgrounds (e.g., low SES, low parental support), they would greatly benefit from the adoption of noncognitive skills related to positive academic identities. The analysis focuses on areas of the school structure—leadership, afterschool activities, and peer networks—as well as the nonacademic curricula related to religious and moral education that contribute to the development of noncognitive skills. The analysis then demonstrates how these identity-building skills enable girl students to overcome the social and economic barriers they face, thus facilitating their potential achievement.

How School Context Facilitates Girls’ Achievement

On Leadership

There exists a large body of research on the role of school leadership in shaping achievement among students by developing practices that contribute to more positive educational experiences (Hallinger & Heck, 1996; Hanushek, 1971; Murnane, 1981). My data also show the value of school leadership, in particular that of the headmistress, for the construction of positive academic identities for girl students who attended APSS. Certainly, at a school like APSS, where students do not want to attend because of “the bad reputation of the school,” it should be even more difficult to convince the poor students of the value of performing well while there. Yet newly appointed headmistress Mary worked to reverse these perceptions. Most importantly for this analysis is how Mary’s egalitarian approach to leadership influences her own perceptions of girl students at APSS. As Mary observed,

Now what I notice about the females in this school . . . the girls in the school, they tend to be a bit timid. I think it has to do with their cultural background. But I have a different background where the male and female are given the same opportunities, so I try to bring this to bear on my leadership.

In this description, Mary is referring to growing up in a household where she viewed her mother and father as providing equal opportunities for her siblings, both male and female. Although her girl students seemingly come from dissimilar backgrounds (in terms of gender relations), she seeks to consciously translate the ideals of equality to her leadership and thus to the culture of the school.

Significantly, Mary is the first headmistress in the school’s 60-year history. In response to this achievement, Mary states,

When I came in, I faced a lot of challenges. When you talk about human challenges and to be the first woman, people are also looking at what does she have? But I tried to bring everybody on board so we can move forward . . . you see, it’s all about your attitude, how you view things.

Headmistress Mary expresses not only the challenges she faces as the first headmistress in the school’s history but also her desire to “move forward” by changing her attitude toward these challenges. In fact, she views her female status as an opportunity to engage in discussions and activities around gender: “Since I am female, it has given me an opportunity to mold the females in the school. I try to encourage them . . . make them feel like there is nothing like you being an inferior sex.” This statement demonstrates how Mary seeks to use her female status to encourage the girl students to remove perceptions of themselves as inferior due to their gender.

During my time at APSS, I witnessed Mary’s actions align with her professed desires as she made several deliberate decisions aimed toward propelling the girls at the school. One such decision resulted in the admission of 10% more females by the end of her third year, thereby increasing the gender ratio to 60:40 in favor of boys. Furthermore, inside and outside of her office, she regularly posted motivational sayings and messages meant to reflect the values she wanted to instill in her students. She posted a message on the school bulletin board encouraging girls to “Be a woman with attitude and a lady with class,” and she kept a mug in her office that she showed to each girl student, including myself, that read, “Act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog.” These clearly gendered messages reflect Mary’s views on the values she wanted to instill in her girl students: being a “lady” with “class” but also “with attitude” like a man. Mary described herself as needing to share these messages because, as she claimed, “I am the only female; the school is now 65 years, and it’s been headed by males.” These thoughts suggest that she felt her presence mattered as a female in a male-dominated space.

It appears that the students internalized these messages or, at the very least, that they acted as positive reinforcement given the students’ responses to the headmistress’s actions. As one girl student stated,

If you are a woman, and you’re in that position, men hate to see women in that position so she has to be that way . . . so in working hours she has a tough face, but after that she is sweet.

This quote demonstrates the student’s understanding of the gendered dimensions associated with the headmistress role as both a woman and an administrator. It also reflects a clear subscription to the rhetoric being promoted on the flyers and other materials around campus.

Instilling Confidence

Nonetheless, perhaps most telling of Mary’s intentionality on the kind of girls she wanted to produce at APSS is reflected in her decision to encourage one student, Lydia, to be the school girls’ prefect—or class president—the first year of the study. Despite her professed confidence when we spoke during the second year of the study, Lydia admitted that when she was first asked, she did not want to participate because she was told not to get involved in leadership roles. More specifically, she stated,

At first I did not believe in myself. From the house, I wasn’t being encouraged. I remember even before I came to [APSS], they were telling me don’t get into any leadership roles. It will be too stressful for you.

Yet with the encouragement of the headmistress, Lydia applied anyway and successfully became the head girls’ prefect of the school. That same year, the headmistress intervened again and changed the policy around the annual speech and prize-giving day by defying tradition and appointing the girls’ prefect—rather than the boys’ prefect—to give the main speech. Lydia described the experience:

Usually it’s the boys’ prefect that gives the speech on annual prize-giving day. And this time around, I don’t know what happened. The news came that this time around the girls’ prefect has to do it. I started getting my things ready, I had to go through some coaching, see some of my teachers.

By taking these actions, not only did Headmistress Mary challenge Lydia to speak before the crowd, but she also defied expectations of who should be able to do so. Moreover, she gave Lydia the opportunity to get the “coaching” to bring out her voice. These tactics played an invaluable role in Lydia’s confidence and self-perception thereafter, as she stated:

I was so nervous. All this time I said to myself, no one else is going to do it. You have to do it. So let’s just get it done and do it all right. After I was done I had so much confidence, I felt like I could do anything. . . like oh there is nothing I can’t do.

Consequently, a year later, Lydia, who at first stated that she didn’t believe in herself, voiced a transformed view. In response to the question of how competitive girls are compared to boys at her school, she stated, “I compete with them and I beat them . . . [chuckles] well not necessarily ‘beat,’ but I perform better than they do.”

Clearly, the headmistress’s deliberate tactics and strategies played a crucial role in the seemingly overconfident attitudes and actions displayed by APSS students despite their circumstances. As explained by Headmistress Mary,

Today [Lydia] can stand in front of the school and give a speech without winking. That shows what the female leadership of this school has done. Now you can look around and see that the girls rub shoulders with the guys. . . . This confidence has grown to the extent that students are really excited whenever you throw a challenge to them.

These same feelings were shared by the assistant headmaster a year later when he recounted the story of Lydia, stating, “Our girls have done well . . . they are rubbing shoulders with the boys . . . one girl is doing very well . . . her delivery presentation of a report was good, the people who saw her wanted her to come back.” Both the headmistress and the assistant headmaster’s quotes demonstrate how an activity as small as giving a school speech can have dramatic effects for girl students’ confidence and aspirations. Yet they also acknowledge how Mary’s “female leadership” enables these activities to take place. Mary’s attentiveness to the importance of being intentional about the tactics employed and the consequences to be gotten from such strategies are important for the achievement-oriented attitudes that ensued among her students.¹⁰

Note that I am using the term achievement-oriented to describe the ways in which students confidently express their academic abilities despite their adverse structural conditions. It is a way of representing the kinds of identities that actions such as those of the headmistress are helping to shape. Nonetheless, these identities were also constantly being reinforced by other aspects of the school’s context, some of which were led by the school’s leadership and some of which emerged directly from the classroom.

Classroom and Ideological Pedagogy Around Religious and Moral Education

In the classrooms, girls faced the issue of being underrepresented not only in the school but especially within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) academic track. When girl students were asked about the disparities that existed between the genders, one stated, “The boys, I don’t know, they just do better . . . I don’t know why . . . you do the same thing as they are doing but you work harder.” Another girl student expressed concern that the presence of males in her class was discouraging:

Yes, this is because anytime I am to learn, I hardly learn with any boy in my class. Sometimes when you want to learn that is when they begin to make noise. I try to explain to them we are here for something, but they don’t get it that way.

The students’ responses demonstrate the difficulties that girl students may have when trying to learn in a classroom with boys. These experiences affect girls’ perceptions of their ability to compete with boys, as one student stated,

It’s a perception that we girls have, we can do something but we can’t be the best . . . even if we are going in for it we can’t really match up to the guys, and I think it has to be erased, it needs to be eliminated.

This statement is indicative not only of the negative perceptions that girls have due to their experiences at school but also of the hope they have that these perceptions can be “eliminated.” I found that the school’s emphasis on religious and moral education contributed to a perception that girl students could achieve despite the barriers before them.

It is important to note that the creation of formal institutions of education across Ghana is largely a product of colonial Christian missionaries (Dei, 2002). Thus, many of the religious activities rooted in traditional Christian schools, such as morning worship, have been institutionalized in the present-day practices of education (although many of these schools have no formal affiliation with Christian-like groups). In addition, most government-subsidized schools continue to teach religion and moral education courses at the basic, junior, and secondary school levels. I show that these courses and related activities promote positive messaging around “belief” and “overcoming” and thus motivate students to hold these perceptions. In particular, they emphasize the importance of spirituality, specifically faith in God, for academic achievement and future aspirations. Consequently, the existence of these religious-like activities such as the religion and moral education courses work to reinforce the AOIs promoted through the school leadership and afterschool activities.

Instilling Faith

Every morning assembly at APSS opened in prayer. An example of a typical prayer recited at these meetings is illustrated in the following:

Dear lord, we thank you for bringing us here safely. It wasn’t for our strength. It wasn’t for our might . . . it wasn’t for our energy. You delivered us out of the hands of the evil one. We hand it over safely to you today. We ask that you grant the new executives knowledge and power to carry this council far. Amen.

The fact that the school day opened in prayer even though the school was not associated with any specific religion is an important area to focus on for understanding the factors that contributed to the development of AOIs in students. For instance, several of the motivational sayings posted on bulletin boards throughout campus were composed of messages such as the following:

Happiness keeps you sweet, trials keep you strong. Sorrow keeps you human, failure keeps you humble. Success keeps you glowing, but only God keeps you going. Let us thank the lord for making us feel so beautiful for ourselves and for each other—[Mary]

When the prophetic grace is poured on you, even your mistakes will become ladders to your success—[Mary]

This messaging illustrates how the school used religion—or references to “God” and “Grace”—to encourage students to be unafraid of failure and mistakes. The signing of these messages by Mary demonstrates the strategic use of the posters to promote her values among the students. And certainly, it appeared that those values translated. When students were asked, “What does it take to be academically successful?,” responses such as the following one were provided:

In order to be successful, you have to be determined, just believe in yourself, you have to know who you are . . . you have to know those abilities . . . those talents that God has deposited in you . . . so that you can unearth them for the benefit of yourself and the benefit of the whole nation.

As illustrated by this response, the student is attributing her abilities in school to God’s doing. Statements such as this one were common among all students examined. It was clear that invoking God was at minimum normal. Thus, even if a student is not religious—in terms of going to church or identifying in a strong way with a religion—the pervasiveness of religious messages still structures one’s thoughts. Religion structures the thoughts of these students because the overarching doctrine, messages, and languages promoted in the educational structure are rooted in “spiritual-like” activities such as morning worship before assembly, prayer before student government meetings, or religious and moral education courses that socialize students to think in a particular way about the role of spirituality in an academic context. Perhaps most telling about the role of religion for achievement is the response of a student who was asked about her ability to afford college:

Each year I have to pay school fees, and someone has to be there to pay, and I won’t say I am afraid of that. I have a faith that. . . . Yes God is going to make a way. I figured out thinking and worrying won’t solve any problem, so just have to pray to God, and I also applied for scholarships.

The girl’s response demonstrates how students’ experiences at APSS contribute to an increased sense of their abilities to overcome the odds against them because of their belief in the ability of “God . . . to make a way.” It is clear, then, that spirituality is contributing to the construction of their worldview. Thus, spirituality of this kind may indeed also facilitate the development of some of the noncognitive skills addressed in these pages. Schools draw on these preexisting notions of spirituality to instill educational values of achievement.

Afterschool Activities and Peer Achievement Networks of Support

Afterschool activities with peers also make an invaluable contribution to the development of these AOIs. Certainly, many scholars who conduct work on motivation and achievement have acknowledged the value of afterschool activities such as student government, sports, and the peer networks they produce (Covay & Carbonaro, 2010; Im, Hughes, Cao, & Kwok, 2016; Lareau & Weininger, 2003; Morris, 2016). This work lends evidence to the mediating effect of extracurricular activities for the relationship between SES and achievement through peer groups. Covay and Carbonaro (2010), for example, describe extracurricular activities as “site[s] where students can practice and develop their noncognitive skills” (p. 42), indicating the valuable role afterschool activities can have for reinforcing achievement

Hébert and Reis (1999) compared successful students to a similar group of high-ability students who did not achieve. They found no relationship “between socioeconomic level and achievement, between parental divorce and achievement, or between family size and achievement” (p. 442). Instead, the authors credited the academic success of these students to their ability to construct achievement-like cultures. These achievement cultures, sometimes called an achievement ideology, a circle, or—by Cordeiro and Carspecken (1993, p. 289)—a “success facilitating interpretive scheme” act as a cultural framework in which students define success in terms of the dominant culture. The literature views students as creating these schemes by developing networks with their teachers and peers through afterschool activities to maintain a positive and successful environment around themselves. The culture these students have created for themselves encourages them—despite their backgrounds—to think differently about their future, in ways similar to those who are not disadvantaged.

In the case of Ghana, I found afterschool activities to play a similarly valuable role for reconfirming achievement by encouraging peer networks—or rather, what I term achievement nets. At APSS, although several students come from households where they are not being encouraged, they encourage each other, thereby creating a peer network of support. These peer networks seem to be critical for achievement. One student stated, “When I did not have money to buy all the books I needed, I could buy one and then trade it with a friend for the next book I needed when I was done.” By working together, then, students can strategically respond to the challenges they experience. Afterschool activities, such as student government, facilitate these connections between students.

Afterschool activities provide additional mechanisms for reinforcing confidence and discipline, skills critical for the construction of AOIs. For example, at APSS, the representation of girls in student leadership roles was relatively low. The second year of the study, one of the girls interviewed, Ama, became the first female vice president of student government in 62 years. She described the role as “very very difficult,” stating that “people expect you to speak when everyone’s mouth is quiet.” Furthermore, Ama became vice president at a time when the school was especially pinched for resources. Yet in her role, she led a successful campaign to raise funds for the purchase of 50 new chairs so that “students could have a place to sit and learn.” The headmistress described Ama as coming from a “real humble background.” In other words, just like most of her peers, she faced stacked odds, and yet after she had the opportunity to participate in government, raising her concerns and seeing them addressed, Ama described her and the group “as proud of ourselves . . . to be the first group to give something back to the school.” She went on to explain how her role became even more important for transforming gender relations at the school:

I remember once the teacher was molesting one of the girl students, I got close to him, he did not know that I was stabbing him in the back—I got together with my executives and we reported the teacher. The next thing we know he put in his resignation notice to leave the school before he got to know it was me.

When asked how she had the courage to report the incident, she described herself as “not afraid of anything.” She went on to state that, “I have seen all that I have to see. I don’t think I am afraid to face anyone or anything.” In this instance, the student used her troubled background to explain her courage in her current role as vice president. She stated,

I don’t want to be like everyone, I want to prove a point that there still can be someone good from the Zungo where no one thinks there can be. That’s what I want to do, I want to prove a point.

The student government, then, provided a mechanism for her to translate the courage that derives from her environment into a successful campaign to end sexual violence in the school. The lessons taught through these afterschool activities—raising funds for the school and seeing those actions celebrated or reporting a teacher for a serious sexual offense and witnessing that teacher being held accountable—play an important role in encouraging girl students to have confidence in their abilities. Altogether, Ama’s experiences act as an example of how the school context can also shape identity by teaching students to effectively adapt traits from their home environment to their school environment.

The value of the confidence absorbed by Ama is perhaps most revealed in her response to the discouragement she experiences from her mother:

When I look at my mother say “You will not be able to finish SS, you will not be able to go to a university . . . ,” I say, “Mom you are wrong; I will be able to finish SS; I will go to a university; I will work.” It’s like: “Sit down [and] look at me.” She is throwing a challenge at me and I am also throwing one back that I can be better than she thinks I am.

In her senior year of high school, Ama was forced to work part-time to afford college applications, but having finally been able to apply, she was denied admission. The following year, she applied again and was admitted into one of Ghana’s top universities. Ama’s experience with taking on challenges and succeeding in her leadership role at the school likely played an important role in mediating the lack of affirmation espoused by her mother. Undoubtedly, this confidence also contributed to her choosing to apply to college a second time even after initially being rejected.

Instilling Self-Discipline

Afterschool activities were also critical for encouraging discipline through the increased responsibilities these activities entailed. Given the two to five hours that girl students of APSS spent on housework each day, the ability to develop disciplined schedules was especially crucial for ensuring their academic success while at the school. Accordingly, one of the central traits explicitly emphasized by the school was that of self-discipline. In fact, signs related to self-discipline, not to be confused with zero tolerance or school-based discipline, were regularly posted on the school’s bulletin board. The following are a few typical examples:

I count him braver he who overcomes his desire than he who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is the victory over self.

People who waste time are the ones who fail to create an identity of their own.

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments. Servants of Christ must be the masters of themselves.

Each message reflects the values instilled in students at APSS. The first one refers to the goal of self-control. The second message refers to being disciplined about one’s time, while the last message emphasizes discipline as a mechanism to achieve self-established goals. Indeed, when asked about daily schedules, Lydia described a daily routine that was typical to girls at APSS:

Lydia:

Ok, I normally wake up around 4 a.m. . . . yes 4 a.m. I do my quiet time, sweep the compound, I sweep the living room, take my bath, come to school. After school I fetch water, then sometimes prepare meals. After that I go to the shop, and I close around 10. When I come back there will be some dishes to wash. Study. So . . . I sleep around 11:30 or 12.

Interviewer:

And then you wake up at 4 a.m.?

Lydia:

Yes. (laughs) Sure.

The student’s retelling of her daily schedule highlights the discipline required for her to balance her home and school life, which results in barely over four hours of sleep each day. Established research on female school completion rates in Africa suggests that students like her become overwhelmed by their responsibilities and thus drop out (see e.g., Fuller, Singer, & Keiley, 1995).

Lydia also faced the issue of her aunt not giving her money to buy books. Yet when asked what she did in response, she stated, “I save money myself. Let’s say I have to board [a] car, I can save money by . . . if I have to board two, I’ll board one and then walk.” When asked if she saw any barriers to achieving her goals, she responded, “No, I don’t get discouraged. If I want something done, I get it done.” Lydia was able to find proactive ways to overcome challenges and thus maintained confidence in her abilities.

As mentioned previously, research demonstrates how students are often rewarded not only for their academic abilities but also for other nonacademic qualities such as self-control and good behavior (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Duckworth & Seligman, 2005). Thus, traits like self-discipline can become a critical tool for enabling academic achievement. The positive messaging around self-control and discipline at APSS and the self-discipline shown by students in their daily schedules demonstrate the ways in which a school might facilitate the promotion of noncognitive skills within its students. These messages together with the intentional practices of school leadership and the peer networks that ensue directly contribute to the development of confidence, faith, and discipline and thus to the construction of AOIs critical for academic success.

The Persistence of AOIs After Secondary or High School

Once Lydia graduated, she took a break from school to work and save up money to apply to college. A year later, in 2012, she was admitted into a top school in Ghana but could not afford to enroll. When I asked her how she felt about it, she responded,

You have some of your colleagues in school . . . they call you [and say] oh this and this is happening . . . and you feel so bad because you haven’t been able and you’re still not too sure you will be going to school and you feel anxious. So I was trying to check on my application for the scholarship but nothing was happening. I was trying to look for other alternatives . . . other things I can do.

I then asked her the same question I had asked her the year before, “Do you see any barriers to achieving the goals you have set for yourself?” Lydia responded, “I know next year someone will have to pay, I cannot say I am afraid of that. I don’t have fear because I have faith.” Even a year after graduating, Lydia continued to profess a strong belief in her ability to find a way that is clearly influenced by her faith, in part because of and in addition to her experiences at APSS.

In 2012, I also asked Headmistress Mary about Lydia and the challenges she was experiencing. She responded by stating, “Here was a brilliant student and a girl as such . . . I told [her] you will go to school no matter what.” Both Lydia and the headmistress showed a high level of confidence in Lydia’s ability to successfully overcome her challenges even though objectively she did not have the resources to do so.

Ama, like Lydia, also did not have the resources but got into college. Nonetheless, when I asked her in 2012 if she was excited about college, she responded,

I am not that excited because I am going to school without the gadgets that I need. So psychologically I am down . . . I have to just sort it out. But what really encourages me [is that] I am the only female from my mom and dad’s side . . . the first girl to go to college.

Ama is keenly aware of her disadvantaged social and economic position but equally aware of why it is important for her to move forward regardless of her status as “the first girl to go to college.” Students like her, who appear to objectively have none of the factors traditionally associated with achievement in terms of resources or parental support, highlight how noncognitive skills such as self-discipline and confidence might contribute to their ultimate achievement. I argue that it is the school context itself, especially through its leadership, curriculum, afterschool activities, and peer networks, that helps students develop these qualities.

Indeed, not all the students examined had the same outcomes. Some went straight to college (n = 4), while others waited an entire year (n = 4). Others waited more than a year (n = 3), one joined the army (n = 1), and several changed their goals from traditional college to teacher-training schools (n = 5). Nonetheless, the positive identities shaped at APSS appeared to remain relatively intact. Students stated, for example, “When I say I’m doing something, I have to get to the highest point” and “I am focused; I know what I am about; and I know what I am here for.” These statements indicate the ways in which these AOIs persisted.

Discussion

By the time students graduate, those who have AOIs embrace important values that will serve them in the long term. In particular, they develop a belief that while society is hostile, they possess a skillset to handle their personal affairs in very disciplined and proactive ways. If these students do not have finances for books, they find something they can trade; if they do not have tuition, they save their bus money and walk; if they have to work for extra cash, they will sell bread in the morning, go to school, and then return back to work after. These students have found tactics to help them positively engage with obstacles, and these skills in tandem with confidence and faith enable these students to be successful. AOIs are about self-belief and developing the tools to react and engage when faced with obstacles. This is what the school context has impressed on these students.

Still, it is important to note that while the girls described previously fit neatly into common conceptions of resilience and individual agency, their actual entry and success in college was to a large degree made possible by the schools they attended and the people around them. Consider the case I referenced earlier of Lydia, who came from a single-parent home and a very poor background. She was admitted to college but could not enroll because of her inability to afford it: “I applied for scholarships and nothing was happening,” she said. “I was stressed . . . losing weight.” But after waiting a year, Lydia was able to secure support to attend school from members of her community. That said, her dilemma cements how even if a girl is resilient, going to college—and being the first in her family to do so—would not be possible without the help of others. The development of AOIs, then, reflects the best possible outcome when institutions see their primary role as stimulating individual growth through the construction of equitable practices and provision of resources rather than expecting students to simply be gritty or resilient.

Do These Achievement Orientations Work for Everyone?

Certainly, not all students were or will be equally receptive, if receptive at all, to these AOIs. For instance, many of the relatively privileged students did not express the same level of conviction in their abilities that the poor students did. The lower levels of expression I observed among these more affluent students were perhaps due to their privileged status. For instance, financially sound households tend to already have “house help” to take on domestic duties. Thus, students from these households do not have to worry about responsibilities typically allocated to girls, due to their privilege. Furthermore, the Gender Report (UNESCO, 2015) revealed that the poorest girls of sub-Saharan Africa remain far less likely to attend primary school than their privileged male and female counterparts. It is also important to mention that the privileged students appeared to be much more aware of the “pay-to-play economics” of the country.¹¹ Accordingly, more privileged students found it less urgent to do well in school, precisely because they did not see academic success in secondary school as the only way to enter college. In this regard, it could also be the case that disadvantaged students used the positive messaging and other tactics described in the paper as a crutch to not feel the need to compare themselves to their more advantaged counterparts. Yet much more work needs to be done to more fully grasp what triggers the emergence of AOIs among various groups.

Regardless, it appears that disadvantaged girl students wanted to believe that through these achievement orientations that they could still be academically successful despite their disadvantage, while their more privileged counterparts had greater flexibility to pick and choose the elements of the achievement orientations around them that they found most suitable. While I cannot say which approach is most desirable, this work provides a sociological explanation for how schools contribute to the development of these important skills by explicating, or rather analyzing and developing, the ways in which they are translated in an everyday school setting.

Do AOIs Apply to Both Western and Non-Western Societies?

Given that the theory of AOIs derives from research conducted within a non-Western or so-called developing country context, this paper raises questions on how applicable these ideas are for Western or so-called developed societies. Indeed, there are clear differences between these two types of societies in terms of their relative social and economic development and the percentage of women enrolled in higher education. Yet there are also significant similarities between them in that young women and girls across the board are still operating in largely patriarchal environments in which very few of them have access to the upper echelons of power. Furthermore, young women and girls in both developed and developing nations are constrained by their biological status due to myriad cultural constraints. For example, in both Ghana and the United States, girls report experiences with sexual harassment (Dunne, 2007; Gruber & Fineran, 2007). In addition, whether a girl is from the city Chicago or Accra, poverty deepens the challenges she will face when trying to navigate secondary school and college, which further highlights the need for noncognitive skills such as AOIs regardless of setting. One difference between students in the West and non-West may be the ability for both groups to access AOIs at the same rate. For example, while many girls of color in the United States face the triple disadvantage of being a racial minority, non-male, and poor, girls in Ghana typically do not face the additional burden of race, which may increase their probability of maintaining positive orientations toward life prospects. Undoubtedly, there remains much that Ghana can, and already has, learned from the West, but this project suggests that there are some lessons that Western societies can learn from Ghana, and likely other developing countries, too.

Conclusion

Overall, in this paper, I demonstrate the multiple ways in which schools can influence achievement in disadvantaged groups, with a focus on girls. More specifically, I show that the achievement of disadvantaged girls in Ghana is realized in large part through the intentional decisions and actions of the school leadership, peer networks built from afterschool activities, and the promotion of curricula that encourage confidence, discipline, and faith. Collectively, the aforementioned components work together to produce AOIs within students: perceptions of self as able to overcome barriers and the tactics to achieve the goals one sets. In this case, these identities become powerful for enabling girl students to navigate the challenges they face, many of which are gender specific.

This work has implications for future studies on the role of school contexts and the identities they produce for improving understandings of noncognitive skills and educational achievement. In particular, the findings provide additional insights on questions related to how schools can mediate the effects of one’s sociocultural environment and individual background through the facilitation of noncognitive skills that promote identity building and strategy development, thereby enabling a mindset critical for achievement. Most notably, it accounts for the specific gender-related challenges that affect the implementation of policies and strategies made for improving the educational outcomes of girls in developing contexts and beyond.

Today, girls in sub-Saharan Africa only have a 50% probability of completing primary school. Yet obtaining a full education is closely linked to many positive life and societal circumstances, including healthier children, economic development, and lower rates of abuse (UNESCO, 2013). Still, education does not remove the fact that globally, girls face sexual harassment and abuse both in and on their way to school. These negative experiences demonstrate that while noncognitive skills matter, ultimately there is a need for the larger sociocultural context to be transformed. Nonetheless, research on noncognitive skills proves that schools can mediate the effects of negative educational experiences in the short term by teaching students how to navigate a largely unjust sociocultural context. Accordingly, it is essential to investigate how noncognitive skills can be critical tools for helping more girls across the globe achieve.

Footnotes

Notes

Sally A. Nuamah, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, Sanford Building, 201 Science Drive, Durham, NC 27708; e-mail: sally.nuamah@duke.edu. Her research sits at the intersections of race, gender, and urban education politics in the United States and Africa. Her book, How Girls Achieve, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

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