Seeking resolutions for the inequities within Indigenous education : unearthing causal psychosocial constructs that impact upon educational outcomes

Abstract

A growing number of demographic studies have highlighted the disadvantaged status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students across nearly all educational settings, ranging from the pre-school to university environments. Despite these studies relying heavily upon descriptive statistical techniques, there is a lack of strong quantitative research examining potential factors that may contribute to this disadvantaged status of Indigenous Australian students, especially within the discipline of educational psychology. With this in mind, this investigation attempted to quantitatively unravel the causal role of varying psychological determinants that may impact upon the academic status of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian students within the secondary education system. Of the potential psychological determinants examined, multiple dimensions of self-concept, motivation and perceptions of racial discrimination are scrutinized for their impact upon Indigenous and non-Indigenous students' subjective educational outcomes (i.e., students' aspirations to complete Year 12 of high school, school enjoyment and perceived usefulness of school for achieving future goals) and objective educational outcomes (standardised maths and spelling achievement). To more confidently draw valid and reliable conclusions, three separate statistical studies were conducted, whereby Study 1, using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) techniques, sought to ascertain the psychometric properties of the measures, in addition to determining the cross-cultural validity of the measurement instruments through CFA invariance testing between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous samples. Study 2, through Multiple Indicator Multiple Cause Modelling (MIMIC), closely examined differences in the response patterns for all the measurement instruments to identify significant differences between the two cultural groups. In addition, Study 2 also ran preliminary Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) path analyses on the first time-wave of data to ascertain the cross-sectional predictive power of the psychological indicators over the varying educational outcomes for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, independent of home Socio-Economic Recourses (SER). Finally, Study 3 utilized SEM causal modelling techniques across two time-waves of data to determine the extent to which each of the psychological indicators was able to causally influence educational outcomes independent of the impact of previous measures of the educational outcomes upon themselves, and SER.

Date of Award	2008
Original language	English