Contact: Roger Martin, (785) 864-7239 [email protected]
HOPE IS IMPORTANT KEY TO STUDENT SUCCESS
LAWRENCE -- Parents who want to send their sons or daughters to a university can give their children, years ahead of time, a gift that's likely to help them succeed.
Hope.
Rick Snyder, director of the University of Kansas clinical psychology program, has found that the score a student makes on an eight-question test of his or her hope is a better predictor of whether a student will make it through a university than the student's ACT test scores or high-school grades.
Snyder said that the study leading to this conclusion involved 200 KU students and lasted six years. Snyder has written a book titled "The Psychology of Hope."
He also wrote the eight-item test. The higher a student scores on the test, Snyder said, "the more likely the student will not drop out, the better the grade point average and the more likely he or she will graduate."
The grade point average of high-hope students was almost one-half point higher than that of low-hope students.
How do you train kids to hope? First, teach them to set goals, Snyder said, and not too many, but more than one, because the hopeful are, like smart investors, diversified and flexible.
Goals can ignite willpower, Snyder said. After goals and willpower are established, parents need to coach "waypower": the ability to map various routes to goals, to subdivide the routes into small steps and to block distractions.
"Freshmen might focus on one overriding goal," said Diane S. McDermott, KU associate professor of psychology, who's partnered with Snyder in his research, "like making it through the first year, and then have subgoals like joining a sorority or making an A in a particular class."
Start the hope training early, the two say. After all, adolescence isn't a time of life that's conducive to setting long-term goals.
The tendency of adolescents is to "think that they're immortal and that everything will be fine," McDermott said.
Snyder presented the research at last year's Kansas Conference in Clinical Child Psychology.
--30--
RSS