minority students' school achievement
For minority students, simply completing a writing assignment designed to affirm a positive identity and sense of "self integrity" near the beginning of the school year raised their school performance and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40%, according to a study published in Science on Sept. 1.
Geoffrey Cohen, one of the two principal investigators, was an associate professor in Yale's Department of Psychology when he began this research and is now an associate professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He says that school settings can be stressful to all students, but that African- American students experience an extra "threat" due to the negative stereotypes about the intelligence of their race.
Julio Garcia, associate research scientist in Yale's Department of Psychology and a member of the research team, says, "People subjected to widely known negative stereotypes impugning the intelligence of their group are aware of these negative characterizations and may worry that performing poorly could confirm the stereotype of their group."
The randomized, double-blind study, replicated a year later with the same results, was conducted at the beginning of the fall academic term at a suburban middle school in the Northeast. The student body was divided almost evenly between African Americans and European Americans. The participants were 119 African-American and 124 European-American 7th grade students from middle- to lower-middle class families. The affirmation exercise targeted the same academic subject for both groups.
The students did a 15-minute writing exercise for which they were given a list of values, such as relationships with friends or family or being good at art. One group of students was randomly assigned to choose their most important value and explain its importance, thus affirming their sense of self-integrity. The control group was asked to write about their least important value.
At the end of the term the students' grades were evaluated and African-American students who had written about values important to them earned higher grades in the course, closing the race gap between them and their European-American peers by 40%. The percentage of African-American students receiving grades of D and F fell from 20% in the control group to 9% in the other group. No effect, either up or down, was seen among the European-American students.
The principal investigators point out that although their findings are important, their intervention should not be viewed as the "silver bullet" that will wipe out the achievement gap. However, it could become another important factor in boosting minority academic achievement.
The other co-authors include the research project director Nancy Apfel of Yale and research assistant Allison Master, now at Stanford University.
The study was funded with grants from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation of Quincy, Massachusetts, and the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale.
-- By Karen Peart
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