> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante While he was rather strict/demanding, too, the article also hin

> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante While he was rather strict/demanding, too, the article also hints to one of the more important causes of his success: "He rejected the common practice of ranking students from first to last and instead frequently told his students to press themselves as hard as possible in their assignments." In educational science the former is called social reference standard and the latter individual reference standard. While sadly the former is still in use more often, longitudinal studies have shown a strong positive effect on achievement for individual reference standards (I only have a German source right now: Rheinberg & Krug, 1999). The reason seems to be that students seem to attribute ratings with social reference to stable attributes like talent ("I'm just not good at math"), whereas individual benchmarks are more often interepreted as a result of (lack of) effort. Interestingly the socially disadvantaged have shown the strongest results with individual reference standards, just as in the case of Jaime Escalante.