How Poverty Affects Children in the Classroom

According to a study by Jensen (2013), students who may be in poverty are less likely to engage in the classroom compared to their middle-class peers. The study results show Impoverished students tend to suffer from a lack of health and nutrition, smaller vocabulary, less effort, less hope and growth mind-set, lower cognition skills, unhealthy relationships, and constant distress. Impoverished people tend to receive less medical attention and healthy habits. Impoverished students also tend to experience a smaller pool of vocabulary when compared to middle and upper-class peers. Students who suffer from low effort in the classroom are seen to exhibit depressive symptoms, which is noted to correlate with an impoverished status. Jensen also found that students who also have a future mindset not focused on hope and growth are also related with lower socioeconomic status. Lower socioeconomic status is also related to lower cognition skills in students. Students who are reinforced with poor relationship skills in the home may bring them over into the classroom, another relation to lower socioeconomic status. Stress is the last factor noted in the article, and it tends to be more constant in students who live in a lower socioeconomic status. 

A distracted student attempting to study

As for my personal beliefs about the impact of poverty within the classroom, I agree that poverty has a large impact in the classroom. I personally experienced some of these effects while I was a student. I had spent most of my early childhood living in homes that were overcrowded and without much money. As a child, I would rarely communicate in class and was so afraid to engage with the curriculum. I realize now that I also shared a lot of factors within this list, such as not having a healthy diet. I would rarely ever eat breakfast and would stay at a low weight for most of my life. I also put forward little to no effort anywhere in the classroom. I never learned to appreciate education and make the most of my time in school, my parents would work long hours and I wouldn't be able to spend much quality time with them. I think a lower cognitive ability and the lack of a wide vocabulary were combined into one during my childhood. I would rarely get the chance to speak English in my home, as my family mostly spoke Korean, which made it difficult to get the opportunities to hear new words. The only way to increase my vocabulary was through school and classmates. Only being able to work with a limited set of words placed a limit on my cognitive ability, I believe. I believe that helping impoverished students is a complicated process that needs to be taken care of for the future of students.