The Future Starts Now.
Pathways is a program implemented in 8th grade that is designed to help all students connect what they are doing in school right now to the person they expect to become one day, with an urgency to begin working hard now.
Pathways was developed by Professor Daphna Oyserman and is built on motivational science.
Pathways was developed and initially tested by a prominent psychologist, Professor Daphna Oyserman, with funding from the National Institutes of Health. Professor Oyserman has published nearly 200 papers testing the motivational framework underpinning Pathways. As a result of her research, we know that students succeed academically when they connect future images of who they expect to become to current strategies for success in school and interpret difficulties along the way as signaling that schoolwork is important.
Prior research has found that students who participate in Pathways have improved…
Attendance
Time spent on homework
Student initiative
Test scores
Grade point average
Social and emotional competencies
Prior research also has found that students who participate in Pathways have reduced…
Course failures
Grade retention
Disruptive behaviors
Depressive symptoms
These positive impacts for 8th-grade students persisted or grew larger by the end of 9th grade.
Pathways Sessions.
1a-1b. Setting the Stage
Students are paired up and briefly interview one another on the skills or abilities they each have that will help them complete the school year successfully (e.g., “well organized,” “positive attitude”). Then each student introduces his or her interview partner in terms of these skills. This provides an initial example of academic possible identities being compatible with important social identities because all youth engage in the task; the take-home message is: “You have some skills and abilities that help you in succeeding in the coming year and others do, too.”
2. Adult Images
Students pick photographs that fit their adult “visions” (their adult possible self). Photographs represent four domains of adulthood—career/job, relationships, community engagement, and material/lifestyle. Photographs include both genders and match the racial-ethnic makeup of the school. The take-home message is: “We all have images of ourselves as adults in the far future.” This implies that important social identities are compatible with a future orientation..
3a-3b. Positive and Negative Forces
Students draw positive and negative forces: people or things that provide energy to work toward their possible identities and those that provide examples of what not to do or say. The take-home message is: “Positive forces help us lay out paths for success and handling difficulties and setbacks; negative forces do the opposite by laying out paths for failure and examples for how not to handle difficulties and setbacks.”
4a-5b. Timelines.
Students draw timelines into the far future, including forks in the road and obstacles. Students start with the present, so all timelines involve school. The take-home message is: “The future is a path that has an order, even though there are forks and obstacles along the way.
6a-7b. Pathways to the Future.
Students choose next-year feared and to-be-expected possible selves and link them with strategies to attain them. Then students choose adult possible selves and link strategies to them, producing a concrete path from next-year possible selves to adult possible selves via current actions (strategies). The first take-home message is: “Strategies are actions you are taking now or could take to become your next-year possible self.” The second is: “Any strategies I’m doing (or could be doing) now to get my next-year possible self will also help me get to my adult possible self.”
8. Action Paths
Students practice articulating specific strategies to attain their academic possible identities using an easy-to-recall formula (because … I will … when …), further highlighting that difficulty in attaining academic possible selves is normal. The take-home message is: “Actions paths are more specific than pathways; they remind me of my goal—my adult possible self—and link that to a time and place in which I will take action to work toward it.”
9a-11b. Everyday Problems
Three sessions focus on (mis)interpretation of difficulty. Students start with puzzles, move on to academic problems, and end with high school graduation and college. Problems are difficult. Students practice breaking problems into smaller parts so that they can experience difficulty as meaning that effort can be increased because the problem is important rather than impossible to resolve. The take-home message is: “I can use the skills I learn in Pathways to break up everyday problems and make progress more likely.”
12a-12b. Wrap up and Moving Forward
The final sessions cement students’ new metacognitive interpretations by having students review the activities in order, critique them, and articulate in their own words each session’s point.