Journal of American Indian Education

Special Edition
August, 1989
AMERICAN INDIAN ACADEMIC SUCCESS: THE ROLE OF INDIGENOUS LEARNING STRATEGIES
Cathaleene J. Macias
Eleven American Indian women enrolled in a Master of Social Work program participated in an interview study designed to identify effective learning strategies. Most of the women reported relying on writing and verbalization as study strategies and said that they preferred essay tests to multiple-choice or true-false tests. This preference for essay tests was linked in the interviews to a strong ability to synthesize knowledge, a cognitive skill identified by researchers as characteristic of Indian people. The Indian women also described themselves as good listeners and as being reluctant to pass judgment before careful, subjective reflection, behaviors which are also characteristic of Indians. These Indian women's introspective reports and high academic performance are evidence that there are distinctive Indian cognitive strengths that facilitate graduate school success.
Cultural discontinuity and inadequate secondary school preparation prevent most Indian college students from completing their degrees and limit severely the number of Indians who are admitted to graduate school (Lin, 1988; McNamara, 1984; Medicine, 1988; Otis, 1981; Sanders, 1987; Scott, 1986). Those Indian men and women who are able to overcome the great odds against their academic success and enter a graduate program are without a doubt exemplary students and resilient individuals. They have had to develop specific strategies for coping with the demands of college. For this reason, it is important that successful Indian students serve as models for Indian academic success and be given the opportunity to share their own strategies for academic survival with other Indian students.
The intent of the present interview study has been to document both the difficulties and the survival strategies of a small sample of academically successful Indian graduate students. Toward the close of the first quarter of the 1987-88 academic year, the research director of the American Indian Education Program in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Utah conducted in-depth interviews with the I I Indian women in the program (no men were currently enrolled) in order to ascertain problems in adjustment and academic performance, as well as to discover what strategies they had developed on their own for academic success. The American Indian Program was selected as a promising research site for identifying Indian learning strategies because it has provided support and counseling for Indian MSW students for over 18 years, graduating over 100 Indian social workers in that period. What emerged from these I I interviews was less evidence of difficulty than evidence of strength, determination and the ability to adapt to new and stressful demands. Although the Indian students in our sample reported distinctly individualistic coping mechanisms, as well as problems personal in nature, when we focused on the commonalities within their separate reports we found an almost unanimous consensus about what makes graduate school difficult and what study strategies seem to be effective in bridging the gap between Indian experience and academic requirements. Because these women's self-insights are rich in understanding, we are reporting the results of the interviews in the hope that they will help counselors and instructors to better serve their Indian students.
Description of the Sample
The women in the study sample were predominantly traditional, reservation Indians. Eight of the women had lived the majority of their lives on a reservation; only three women had been raised in urban areas. While all of the women were bicultural, familiar with their own Indian heritage and culture as well as mainstream American social and academic expectations, some were bilingual as well. Three of the women were Navajo, each from a different location on the reservation. The eight other women were Yurok, Yakima, Shoshone-Bannock, Oglala Sioux, Mandan-Hidtasa, Wasco-Delaware-Shawnee, Yankton-Sioux and Opelousa. Except for the absence of men, these Indian students were representative of participants in the University of Utah MSW Indian Education Program over the last five years.
The majority of the 11 Indian women students were in their late thirties to early forties; three were in their twenties. Seven of the women had preschool or school-age children. Most of the women had been out of school for a few years before entering the graduate program, but three had just completed their undergraduate degrees. Almost all had earned a strong B average as undergraduates. The only correlation between these demographic variables was between age and motherhood, with the women in their twenties being those without children.
While monthly lunch meetings had provided an opportunity for the students to discuss their programs, courses and assignments, as well as personal matters, almost none of the topics covered in the interviews had been previously discussed by the women in the group. Therefore, the consensus in interview responses is not a result of mutual influence or conformity, but rather, in the author's opinion, reflects each woman's very personal perspective on her educational experience. This impression was verified by the women themselves during the interviews.
Interview Format
The research director conducted private, focused interviews with each of the Indian women. The interviews lasted from one to two hours and, while the interviewer followed a predesigned list of topics related to academic experience, she addressed each topic as it arose naturally in the interview. Each interview began with a personal account of the interviewee's educational experience and ended with a request for advice for new Indian graduate students. Audio-recordings were made of each interview, but notes and verbatim quotations were also made by the interviewer and used as the primary data. The audio-recordings were used to verify the interview notes and were given to each interviewee for safekeeping immediately after her interview.
Results
Difficulties Encountered in School
Since most of the women had left their reservations to come to graduate school, the expectation to succeed and return with a MSW weighed heavily on them. This performance anxiety was aggravated by homesickness and, for some, difficulty with adapting to an urban environment. Several women said that they would have already returned to their homes had not so much been at stake.
In addition to the pressure and homesickness, three very specific aspects of graduate school work were reported to be a source of anxiety for almost all of the women. The first was the type of writing required: impersonal and analytic. Several students reported receiving criticism for writing in too personal a style, or for limiting their writing to Indian concerns. A personal, Indian-oriented style had allowed some of the women to excel as undergraduates, and so it was disconcerting to find it was a disadvantage in graduate school,
The second source of difficulty was vocabulary, not only with the jargon and terminology common to the profession, but also with academic language characteristic of journal articles and professorial lectures. Two of the women carried dictionaries to class. Another woman went so far as to rewrite in her own words, with the aid of a dictionary, those readings which she found difficult. While in some cases the women blamed their limited vocabulary on an inferior education, with most it was due to lack of opportunities to use academic, professional language.
The third aspect of graduate school work which presented difficulty for Indian students was true-false and multiple-choice exams. While not all objective tests were criticized (e.g., matching tests were often preferred), these two types of tests were sources of frustration and anxiety. By contrast, essay exams, while requiring more effort and often more preparation, were the most preferred mode of examination. In spite of the fact that many of the women had trouble writing English, every woman felt she had a better advantage on essay tests than on multiple-choice and true-false exams.
Coping Strategies
The 11 women graduate students in the program all passed the first quarter of the school year under study. Four of 11 women were second year students and had maintained an A or a B average during the previous year and now continued their high performance. Some of the first-year students did exemplary work in even this first quarter of graduate school, notoriously the hardest, and won the recognition of their professors. There was no correlation between demographic variables, such as reservation residence, and course grades.
Systematic Studying
How had these Indian women managed to cope so well with an emotionally stressful environment and a challenging curriculum? First, each of the women reported that she held fast to a systematic study schedule. These study schedules varied in form, but all consisted of spreading out reading and exam preparation and avoiding cramming. Spare moments were used for reading throughout the day, but study time was usually spent in a particular spot, usually at home. Since several women had children, this scheduling far surpassed mere self-discipline and entailed strategic planning. In this regard, the Indian students were typically good students, and their determination and organization are probably similar to that of many reentry students.
Multimodal Learning
Each of the Indian women had specific strategies for memorization and synthesis of course material. Some strategies were unique to individuals, some were common to almost all of the women. What is of interest is the very clear finding that all of the women are multi-modal in their learning styles. All of the 11 women interviewed used more than one sensory modality for remembering, the most common of which was written and verbal language processing. All of the women reported that they prepared for a test by first reading, and often rereading if time permitted, the assigned articles or books and then writing in their own words or copying out important phrases or summaries. Likewise, all of the women reported making study outlines or copying over their notes. The physical movement involved in copying and writing was reported to be in and of itself an essential part of this study procedure, and was considered superior to just reading in terms of committing material to memory. In addition, all but one of the women reported that they relied upon reading aloud and talking to themselves or to their study partner as a way of memorizing.
Hearing the material spoken aloud was explicitly and repeatedly described as essential to remembering. Seven of the 11 women reported that they also used visualization techniques for remembering. The visualization techniques reported were often idiosyncratic, e.g., the use of mathematical symbols as associations, but no woman relied entirely or even primarily on visualization as a memory technique any more than they did on reading, writing or verbalizing. A combination of modalities was consistently described as the preferred learning style.
These findings, of course, are in keeping with theories of learning which propose that acquisition and retention are optimal when students rely on a variety of learning strategies (e.g., Kane, 1984), but the findings stand in contrast to those theories of cultural learning style which propose that Indians learn best with visual presentations and find difficulty with lectures and assigned readings (Diessner & Walker, 1986; Gardner, 1980; McShane & Plas, 1984). In light of these introspective and sophisticated Indian self-reports, there is good reason to doubt the veracity of research which labels Indians as "visual" in learning style with low capacities for "verbal" learning. Most of these studies have been conducted through the administration of various diagnostic (e.g., cerebral hemispheric laterality) and intelligence (e.g., the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) tests from which the subjects' potentials for "visual" and "verbal" academic tasks were inferred. However, high visual and low verbal scores on tests designed by academic White society may simply reflect a differential bias: visual skill test items may be less culturally and linguistically biased than items measuring verbal, or language, skill. The results of our in-depth interviews with competent Indian students makes it apparent that Indian difficulty with lectures and readings is most probably the result of transitional language and vocabulary problems, rather than a reflection of a cerebral or sensory preference. The observation that Indians are high in visual acuity and unusually responsive in the visual perceptual mode (Guilmet, 1981; Kleinfield, 1973; Osborne, 1985; Philips, 1983) does not necessarily mean that they must be taught primarily through visual, pictoral instruction. It is both demeaning and academically limiting to assume that Indians cannot handle a typical college curriculum because they test low in "verbal," linguistic ability when most American Indian tribes have rich literary and oral traditions that have required substantial linguistic skill (Allen, 1986; Battiste, 1986; Gill, 1987).
Reliance on Indian Thinking Skill
Perhaps the most important result of our interviews is the identification of specific aspects of Indian culture and experience that are advantageous to graduate school performance. All of the Indian women we interviewed stressed the pragmatic value of getting their graduate degree. Most expressed interest in now attaching theories to the practical learning they had gained in their previous work experience. While most social workers are undoubtedly pragmatic in attitude, what is of interest here is the degree to which the Indian women reported using theory to tie together the various facets of practical knowledge they had already acquired. They also frequently said that everything they heard or read was immediately connected to their reservation and examined for its appropriateness and applicability to Indian people. In this way, complex concepts and elaborate theories were immediately associated with concrete memories and not only made more comprehensible, but also more easily remembered. This learning strategy reflects two sophisticated cognitive abilities: (1) the ability to critically evaluate and analyze a particular concept while maintaining a subjective, accepting perspective, and (2) the ability to synthesize extensive and diverse information.
The first ability, that of analyzing and critically examining from a subjective perspective, is a relatively unnoted Indian skill. The Indian women in our sample reportedly described themselves as being accepting of what they were taught in their courses. One woman said that this is what made her a good listener, stressing her culture's valuation of listening. We included a question concerning skepticism in our interviews, but found that these 11 Indian women were by and large not very skeptical of what they were taught. Their responses were surprising in light of recent findings that women typically become more skeptical and critical of what they are taught as they reach higher levels of education (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger & Tarule, 1986). Deeper probing, however, revealed the Indian women were describing their ability to try on new ideas, to experience an idea from the inside out, and to then evaluate it from this subjective, pragmatic perspective. This, indeed, does make for a good listener, and reveals that, in spite of their openmindedness, the Indian women are both analytical and critical in their thinking. Once new information had been examined from an accepting position, the women felt free to reject parts of an idea, to adapt the idea to make it more personally and culturally relevant, or to reject the idea altogether. This listening strategy is very different from that typically observed in graduate students - and characteristic of Western academic thinking—whereby an individual distances himself from an idea, analyzing and examining it from an objective, "scientific" perspective, and refuses to accept it until judgment has been rendered. It reflects, in contrast to Western objectivity, a respect for the world outside the self and a recognition of the potential for knowledge and insight to come from anywhere.
Paula Gunn Allen, the respected Indian writer and scholar, tells us that empathetic, participatory listening in silence is an important part of Indian oral tradition. As she points out, most traditional Indians believe that an accepting, subjective stance is essential to full understanding, and "detached, analytic, distanced observation" will not permit a listener to grasp the meaning of Indian symbolism and mythopoetic speech (1986, p. 105). She proposes that the strong oral traditions that are common to all American Indian tribes predispose Indian people to listen intently to both elders and teachers in a non-demonstrative, introspective way, experiencing fully what they hear. The Indian students in our sample reported they received new information through respectful, non-evaluative listening, followed by private reflection. This nonresponsive listening reflected not only respect for the lecturer or speaker, but also the women's accepting, empathetic experience of what they heard.
The sound cognitive ability apparent in our sample of Indian students, synthesization, has been noted by cognitive researchers to be a characteristic of American Indian intelligence. Several research studies (Kamphaus, Kaufman & Reynolds, 1985; Krywaniuk, 1974; More, 1987) administered the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children and found that Indian children typically score higher on the subtests designed to measure simultaneous processing, i.e., the integration of varied stimuli into a meaningful whole, than on subtests designed to measure sequential processing, i.e., memory for information presented in a serial order. Their scores on the simultaneous subtests were usually as high or higher than the scores of comparison groups of White children in spite of biases in the tests favoring the more English-proficient White children. The simultaneous processing subtests included such tasks as the chronological ordering of photographs; sequential processing was measured by tasks such as the recall of an arbitrary sequence of pictures. Besides requiring more analytic ability, simultaneous processing tasks were more meaningfully related to ideas and experience than were the sequential tasks. It may be that simultaneous processing, the ability to synthesize and recall complex information, is reflective of not only higher-order cognitive ability but also a predisposition toward integrating new information into existing knowledge and experience. Bruner (1960) acknowledged the role of synthesis in aiding memory and comprehension and emphasized that recognition of an underlying structure allows a student to learn a great amount of information in a relatively short period of time. Recent research by cognitive theorists has substantiated the superiority of learning methods utilizing a synthesis of information, and have developed specific organizing techniques such as "mapping" or "networking." (See Van Patton, Chao and Reigeluth, 1986, for a review of synthesis learning strategies.)
Since Indian children have been found to do well at tasks requiring synthesis of complex information, but not so well at tasks which are arbitrary and require rote memory, it is important that educators structure what they teach in ways meaningful and relevant to Indian students. It is also essential that educators develop and encourage the synthesis abilities of Indian students. It may well be that Indians who do succeed academically do so because they have relied heavily upon a cultural predisposition to integrate and relate what they learn. Linguistic researchers Ron and Suzanne Scollon have described the Athabaskan individual's organization of knowledge in terms similar to those used by the Indian women in our sample:
We characterize the knowledge of the individual as highly integrated. Whatever is known is known from the point of view of the individual ... What is of importance in any knowledge is that the individual can see how to incorporate it into his own experience (Scollon & Scollon, 1981, p. 101).
Certainly this synthesizing ability has distinct advantages in school and in everyday life, but it also offers academia a source for creative theorizing and innovative planning. If mainstream academic theory can be integrated into Indian culture and experience, it may offer more substantial insights with practical implications. It is the responsibility of universities to encourage their Indian students to synthesize mainstream theory into their own cultures.
Conclusions and Implications for Higher Education
Recognition of the specific cognitive abilities of our sample of Indian MSW students throws light on the difficulties they reported toward the end of their fast quarter of 1987. The Indian students stated preference for essay tests needs to be reconsidered in light of their reported tendency to synthesize and integrate what they learn. Almost every woman in our interviews reported that she felt her ideas "flow" once she began to answer an essay test question, each idea connecting with another in either contrast or complementarity. Dansereau and his colleagues (1979) found that synthesizing ability is indeed advantageous for essay and fill-in-the-blank concept tests. But these researchers also found that synthesizing ability is unrelated to performance on multiple-choice and short-answer tests. They proposed that the essay and completion tests required an understanding and interrelation of main ideas, whereas multiple-choice and short-answer tests required only a memory for details and, therefore, synthesizing ability was not utilized when taking these latter, "objective" type tests. For these reasons, college faculty should be informed that multiple-choice tests are inappropriate for assessing the learning of Indian students, and Indian students should be warned to "shelve" their synthesizing tendency when taking this type of test.
Likewise, the Indian women's difficulty in making their writing less personal, less concentrated on their own experience, is perhaps the expression of this same tendency to want to synethesize what is learned into their own repertoire of experience. It has been proposed by the women that new Indian students be forewarned of this preferred academic writing style before they begin their studies.
While we do not propose that our sample of Indian women is representative of either Indians in general (a dubious possibility in any instance) or all Indians enrolled in graduate programs, we do conclude with some confidence on the basis of these 11 individual women's reports that Indian academic success is not dependent upon acculturation to mainstream White society (since eight of these 11 graduate students had spent most of their childhood and adult lives on reservations), but instead is facilitated greatly by a reliance upon culturally-transmitted cognitive abilities characteristic of some, and perhaps most, Indian tribes.
When the women in our study are considered as evidence of Indian potential for academic success and the dynamics of their success examined, it becomes apparent that education in general, and graduate education in particular, need to reevaluate their demands on Indian students and reassess their expectations for Indian student success. While remedial help with reading and writing academic discourse may continue to be essential to American Indian achievement, it is imperative that higher education acknowledge that these grammatical and vocabulary deficits are superficial indicators of verbal ability which often camouflage the more fundamental skills of knowledge synthesization and analytic reflection characteristic of the Indian students we have studied.
Cathaleene J. Macias is a Social Psychologist and currently Research Director of the American Indian Education Program, Graduate School of Social Work, University of Utah.
Cathaleen J. Macias would like to express appreciation to 11 Indian women who collaborated on this research project by sharing their experiences and insights: Cindy Aguilera, Chris Atine, Donna Irwin Barrows, Carolyn Brown, Xan Clemmer Kali, Marian Knudson, Genevieve Nez, Connie Lee Pourier, Marlene Skunkcap, Lois Weddell, and Evalina S. Williams. Gratitude is extended as well to Dr. Dan Edwards, Director of the American Indian Education Program in which these women were enrolled, for his encouragement and support during the project and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, grant no. 5 T01 MH 17512-05.
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