The Development of Critical Consciousness and its Relation to Academic Achievement in Adolescents of Color

2019/05/29 by Scott Seider, Shelby Clark, Daren Graves · 108 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Academic achievement #Action (physics) #Agency (philosophy) #Consciousness #Critical consciousness #Critical thinking #Critical variable #Developmental psychology #Early Childhood Education and Development #Grit, Self-Efficacy, and Motivation #Mathematics education #Pedagogy #Psychology #Sense of agency #Social psychology #Social science #Sociology #Youth Development and Social Support

paper · doi:10.1111/cdev.13262

published in Child Development 91(2), e451-e474 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 2019/05/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Critical consciousness, the process by which individuals come to understand, analyze, and take action against systems of oppression, is associated with several positive youth outcomes. However, little research has considered how the core components of critical consciousness (critical reflection, political agency, critical action) are associated with academic achievement. The present study explored the extent to which the developing critical consciousness of adolescents of color (N = 364) over 4 years of high school predicted academic achievement, as measured by grade point average (GPA) and the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Results demonstrated that adolescents' critical reflection and critical action intercepts predicted SAT scores whereas critical reflection and critical action slopes predicted GPAs. Political agency was not predictive of either academic outcome.

Citations

• Dispositions Toward (Collective) Struggle and Educational Resilience in the Inner City: A Case Analysis of Six African-American High School Students
• The Causal Effects of Cultural Relevance

Cited by

• Adolescents’ developing awareness of inequality: Racial and ethnic differences in trajectories
• Grappling with Whiteness: Latent Profiles of White Racial Consciousness and Affect’s Impact on Critical Reflection
• Beyond Prompt Engineering: Prompting (L)iteracy, Linguistic Capital, and Educational Inequality
• What Drives You? Black and Latinx Youth's Critical Consciousness, Motivations, and Academic and Career Activities. [europepmc]
• Giving priority to race or wealth in peer group contexts involving social inclusion. [europepmc]
• Critical Action and Ethnic-Racial Identity: Tools of Racial Resistance at the College Transition. [europepmc]
• Evidence to the Need for a Unifying Framework: Critical Consciousness and Moral Education in Adolescents Facilitate Altruistic Behaviour in the Community. [europepmc]
• The role of multisystemic resilience in fostering critical agency: UK adolescents during the COVID-19 Pandemic. [europepmc]
• Complicating critical discussions in gender sexuality alliances: Youth desire for intersectional conversations and the experience of fragmentation. [europepmc]
• Identifying Culturally Relevant School Support Profiles and Links to Academic Functioning in Adolescents. [europepmc]
• Queering critical consciousness: Measurement and implications of critical consciousness among sexual and gender minority youth. [europepmc]
• Critical Consciousness in Sport Scale (CCSS): development and initial psychometrics properties. [europepmc]
• Levelling the ground for decolonising the nursing curriculum: A matter of critical consciousness. [europepmc]

Related

• A bitter pill to swallow? Patterns of critical consciousness and socioemotional and academic well-being in early adolescence.
• Development and Validation of the Critical Consciousness Scale
• Adolescents’ developing awareness of inequality: Racial and ethnic differences in trajectories
• Prosocial Behaviors of Black Adolescent Boys: An Application of a Sociopolitical Development Theory
• Shards from the glass ceiling: Deconstructing marginalizing systems in relation to critical consciousness development