Challenging negative stereotypes to narrow the achievement gap

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-06/cu-cns062415.php

Public Release: 24-Jun-2015
Columbia University

Negative stereotypes can work in subtle but powerful ways to sap confidence in the classroom. Girls and minorities may fear that a bad grade will confirm negative stereotypes about their intelligence, creating added stress that can undermine performance.

It turns out that a simple intervention -- having students write a short essay affirming values important to them -- can ease the anxiety and improve academic performance.

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"The act of writing about family and friends gives students the chance to assert their self-worth in an otherwise threatening environment," said the study's lead author, Travis Riddle, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia. "This psychological foothold may motivate them to challenge themselves and live up to their potential."

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Evidence that negative stereotypes can hurt academic performance was established in the 1980s by pioneering social psychologist Claude Steele, formerly the provost of Columbia, now the provost at University of California at Berkeley. Steele and his colleagues showed that women's math scores improved if they were told that gender made no difference in test results, and that African Americans did worse on a verbal test if first asked to identify their race.

A 2006 study in Science built on this work by showing that a brief exercise in which seventh-graders wrote about values important to them substantially raised the grades of African Americans, reducing the achievement gap by 40 percent.

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