In a striking experiment about stereotypes and academic achievement, African-American seventh graders performed better in school months after they were asked to spend 15 minutes thinking about their identity and values.
The results of the study, published in today’s issue of the journal Science, demonstrate how racial stereotypes can adversely affect minority students and how simple interventions can partly counteract those stresses, researchers said on Thursday. . . .
3 thoughts on “Stereotypes and the Achievement Gap”
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Is no one else surprised there are no coments on this? This is astonishing! If we could reduce the achievement gap around here by 40% (!) simply by recognizing that sterotypes exist and then helping students to re-affirm their own self-worth and identity with a fifteen minute essay, just imagine what we could do combining that with real efforts at institutional equity (and not just doing away with challenge for everyone). This sounds so simple, doesn’t mean yet more (money for) staff development or ‘sensitivity training’ (I KNOW instituitonal racism exists — tell me how we are going to root it out — don’t waste my energy trying to convince me that I personally am a racist), and doesn’t cost tons of curriculum money either.
This really is an impressive and well designed study. Students were randomly assigned to the intervention (wrting about their values) and teachers were unaware of which group students were in and were not informed of the hypothesis. Nonetheless, students who wrote about their values for 15 minutes performed better over the course of the semester than students who wrote about values that were not personally important. Not only did the students do better in the targeted class, but they performed better in all of their classes.
It would seem to me that every English class in the District should have students complete this exercise. It won’t eliminate the achievement gap, but it very well could help reduce it.
I’m not so impressed with this study. Why? There is no control group! Further, I’m not sure which group received the “treatment”. In fact, one group received what I would call the “positive treatment” (PT); what the authors indicated was the control group received the “negative treatment” (NT).
There were two experiments, which differed only in extensiveness of the “treatment”.
The kids making up the groups were 7th graders from middle SES or lower SES homes, in schools of equal African American kids and “European” American kids (is that synonymous with “whites”, or “whites and hispanics”, etc?).
In the first experiment, the PT group was asked to “indicate their most important value (Science, page 1308) from a predefined list created by the authors). The NT group was asked to indicate their least important value. In addition, the PT group was asked to write a paragraph explaining why their choice as important to them, while the NT group was asked to write why their choice might be important to others.
In the replicated study, the PT and NT groups were asked to indicate the 3 most important or 3 least important values, respectively, and write a paragraph as in the first experiment.
To emphasize: there was no group that received no treatment or something like a placebo. So, there was no control group! And, there was no comparison shown in the report, and no discussion which compared either of these groups to such a control group.
I content that the NT group had a more difficult task than the PT group: identifying their least important value, then writing about why that unimportant value would be valuable to some one else.
I think this task is hard!
Is empathy a developed trait of 7th graders? Can they place themselves in others positions?
Were the scores of the NT group depressed because of this exercise, thereby exacerbating the difference between the groups?
I also don’t know what the list of values the authors came up with, if there was a relationship between the values chosen and their subsequent scores, or what the distribution of scores was within each group (they only give the averages).
I don’t know what to make of this study — it seems too confounded allow one to make any assessment.