Racial Achievement Gap Narrowed by Sterotype Stress Reducers
From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:
An in-class writing assignment designed to boost students' sense of identity and personal integrity reduced the achievement gap between African-American and nonminority students by 40 percent, according to a new study by a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher.
The results suggest that targeted psychological interventions on a wider scale could potentially help narrow the racial achievement gap among U.S. students, according to Associate Professor Geoffrey Cohen of CU-Boulder's psychology department and his fellow principal investigator Julio Garcia of Yale University's psychology department.
"Our research was based on the idea that ethnic minority students experience, on average, higher levels of stress in the classroom," Cohen said.
"This is because they are concerned that if they do poorly it could confirm the negative stereotype about the intellectual ability of their racial group.
Past research has found that school settings in general are stressful to many students regardless of race.
However, many African-American students experience chronic stress in school stemming from negative stereotypes portraying them as less intelligent than their peers, according to Cohen and Garcia.
The study found the average performance gap in the course between African-American students and their white peers at a suburban middle school in the northeastern United States was three-quarters of a grade point on a four-point scale for those in the control group.
As an example of how chronic stress affects performance, Cohen used a workplace analogy where two good friends work together and one of them tells the other that the boss may not like him.
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