To this day the stigma of being African-American is still relevant, as it has proved to have an effect on the educational outcomes of these individuals. Traditionally blacks have known to score lower on standardized tests than their white counterparts. It was argued by Dr. Claude Steele and Dr. Joshua Aronson that blacks are assisted in their underperformance by a stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson). Most people know of stereotypes, for example: Asian-Americans excel in mathematics, women do poorly in math, and for African-Americans they have consistently tested poorly. Steele and Aronson have argued that these negative stereotypes can be extremely harmful and assert that stereotype threats can seriously alter academic achievement and motivation for these students.
Through the course of their studies, they have found out those black students who value academic success the most, are also the most susceptible to stereotype threat. This occurs in two ways: first, it adds a pressure that may directly undermine their performance; second, if it persists as a chronic feature of the school performance domain, it may force the affected students to misidentify with that domain. This could explain a multitude of explanations, such as the discrepancy between SAT scores for whites and blacks, even when the socioeconomic class is not a factor. Also, as we look at the second explanation this also gives us more information to why black students disengage from academics in high school.
Steele and Aronson are not first to test stereotype threat as during the 1960’s Irwin Katz and his colleagues suggested that stereotype threat could also influence performance on a test. Katz found that blacks were able to score better an IQ subtest if the test was presented as a test of eye-hand coordination. In addition, another key finding showed that blacks score better on an IQ test when they believe the test will be compared to that of other black.
Later these two professors take Katz findings to conduct a set of tests of their own. Their goal was to test the hypothesis that predicts underachievement in test situations for school-identified blacks. In order find a school identified set of students they pooled students from Stanford University, where black and white students were randomly assigned to test different treatments of conditions. In this study the students were given a diagnostic test, and the results were similar to that of Katz in that blacks perform worse than whites. However when the test is presented in another fashion other than a test of academic ability, the performance of blacks improves drastically. In this study the interaction was only marginally significant, but if we look at later studies we see a in increase importance.
In their second study, black students again took a diagnostic test. The results showed that the nature of the test impairs the rate as well as the accuracy of black’s performance. This experiment was similar to the first, except the test time was cut into half and after the test the participants completed a version of the Spielberger State Anxiety Inventory.
The third study looks to examine why framing tests as measures of ability impairs the performance of black participants. Here the students did not even take a test instead they were asked to complete a word fragment task, which has been shown to measure the cognitive activation of constructs either primed or self-generated. The first twelve fragments reflected race-related constructs or an image associated with African-Americans. Fragments consisted of minority, welfare, color, token, inferior, weak, flunk, lazy and black. Later the participants completed a questionnaire that asks for their hobbies and activities they enjoyed the most. Those that were stereotypically related were basketball, being a couch potato, or hip-hop and were found to be avoided the most by African-American students. In addition, students were asked to complete a demographic questionnaire that asked about age, gender, major. There was also a second item that asked about race. It was hypothesized that students in the diagnostic section were more likely to not acknowledge their race.
The results of this study showed that blacks in the diagnostic section were able to complete more of stereotype race-related fragments. The first three studies showed that presenting a difficult test as a representation of diagnostic of ability can undermine the performance and make them feel threatened by racial stereotypes.
The fourth study asked the some participants to record their race on demographic questionnaire before taking the test. They reasoned that doing so might force these participants to think more about racial stereotypes, feel stereotype threatened when they took the test, and as a result perform worse on the test. The results showed that reporting racial identify depresses performance on a difficult test even when it was not presented as a diagnostic of intellectual ability.
In the fifth study, black students were placed in race-primed condition, the only difference this time was that black participants were administered by computer. The results showed that race-primed participants answered significantly fewer items correctly than do unprimed participants. This study also confirms that race priming depresses the performance of black participants on a difficult examination, and that it causes reactions that could be response to stereotype threat.
In conclusion, the first three tests showed that if stereotypes are primed for the test-takers, the students will perform worse on the test. However, the last two tests showed that merely asking a set of black students to record their race is enough to impair their test performance, even when the test is not portrayed as measure of intellectual ability. Which makes one think, is identifying yourself as an African-American enough to for students to perform less well on tests? And if so, what does this say about how blacks perceive their group identity as being black
Key
Yellow: Relates to my topic about African Americans in school
Red: Word of Interest
Purple: Something to think about throought my research
My Thoughts
This reading brought up an entirely new idea that may have a big impact on my research. The author argues that sterotypes actually hinder African Americans from performing well on test and that by asking them what to state their race makes them feel threateneed. I cannot say that I believe what the author argues but it is definetly something to take into consideration and explore. I wonder if the author failed to notice other factors that might also have an impact or play a role in why African Americans perform poorly on tests.
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