Group items tagged

"The fear of confirming derogatory stereotypes can hinder academic performance. Researchers are scaling up relevant interventions to statewide programs"

Kray, et. al. explore stereotype threat in organizational contexts and focus on four domains: leadership, negotiations, entrepreneurship, and competitiveness. Interventions to reduce stereotype threat include: stereotype management, which includes acknowledging stereotypes; hiring and training; and organization cultural, including both fosters identity safety and valuing effort.

Founded in 1943, ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) is an educational leadership organization dedicated to advancing best practices and policies for the success of each learner. Our 175,000 members in 119 countries are professional educators from all levels and subject areas--superintendents, supervisors, principals, teachers, professors of education, and school board members.

"If we are serious about closing achievement gaps, we will have to move beyond the simplistic rhetoric of "It's the family," or "It's the schools," or "It's poverty"-or "It's stereotyping," for that matter. " In this article, the author argues that stereotype threat, an invisible factor, negatively impacts the performance of affected students, ranging from African American males to girls in math-oriented domains. It may account for some of the achievement gap. Stereotype threat occurs when others have negative expectations of the student's performance based on some external stereotype. The student then has to overcome the inherent negative threat, thereby facing two potential failures - actually performing poorly and the perception of performing poorly because of the stereotype. Research by the author and a colleague demonstrates that due to this additional stress and pressure, the student does more poorly precisely because he or she tries too hard in a situation in which a more relaxed concentration leads to success, particularly in high-stakes evaluations. Because stereotype threat is partly situational, the author believes that students can be taught to overcome it and that teachers and others can learn to avoid it. (WestEd)

Science Correspondent Cara Santa Maria summarizes the findings of AAUW's 2010 report, Why So Few?, which explores causes of the gender gap in STEM fields. Cites over 300 experiments illustrate the validity of this research. At puberty the gender gap expands dramatically. Interventions suggested: 1) More female representation in the curriculum 2) Expose the biases.

"Others believe that blacks constitute a community that is largely beyond intervention and that no amount of funding or special programs can fix what ails the perpetually troubled. An attendant assertion is that blacks who do achieve have outsmarted stereotype vulnerability and are outliers. Some say these blacks are exceptions and are successful because they embrace and actualize a white cultural-value system. These erroneous and insulting beliefs persist because they are buoyed by a constant recitation of negative statistics about blacks in the research literature and unrelentingly circulated in news accounts. Such wrongheaded assertions negate accurate and meaningful portrayals of black people. Mostly, they misdirect formulation of educational and social policy and skew funding priorities in education and elsewhere. Regrettably, Americans have been socialized by the scholarly and journalism communities to accept at face value negative data about blacks and been trained to be skeptical about and question any positive information about black people. This is so because little positive information of consequence about blacks is disseminated."

Intelligence, Motivation, and Intellectual Curiosity are the three pillars of intelligence, and yet, it is very fragile. "Most of my work seeks to understand and remediate race and gender gaps in educational achievement and standardized test performance. Often, the low performance of blacks in particular, but other minorities as well, gets casually chalked up to genetic or cultural differences that supposedly block acquisition of skills or values necessary for academic achievement. In sharp contrast, my students, colleagues, and I have uncovered some exciting and encouraging answers to these old questions by looking at the psychology of stigma - the way human beings respond to negative stereotypes about their racial or gender group. What we have found suggests that being targeted by well-known cultural stereotypes ("blacks are unintelligent", "girls can't do math", and so on) can be very threatening, a predicament my mentor and I called "Stereotype Threat." Stereotype threat engenders a number of interesting psychological and physiological responses, many of which interfere with intellectual performance and academic motivation. I have conducted numerous studies showing how stereotype threat depresses the standardized test performance of black, Latino, and female college students. These same studies showed how changing the testing situation (even subtly) to reduce stereotype threat, can dramatically improve standardized test scores. This work offers a far more optimistic view of race and gender gaps than the older theories that focused on poverty, culture, or genetic factors. We have found that we can do a lot to boost both achievement and the enjoyment of school by understanding and attending to these psychological processes, thereby unseating the power of stereotypes and prejudice to foil the academic aspirations of the young people who, just by virtue of being born black, brown, or female, are subjected to suspicions of inferiority.   A particular focus of m

SHIELDING STUDENTS FROM STEREOTYPE THREAT A G U I D E F O R T E AC H E R S Shielding Students from Stereotype Threat: A Guide for Teachers

Empirically Validated Strategies to Reduce Stereotype Threat

What could you do for an hour in the first year of college that would improve minority students' grades over the next three years, reduce the racial achievement gap by half and, years later, make students happier and healthier? The answer, Stanford psychologists suggest, involves an exercise to help make students feel confident they belong in college.

Stereotype threat arises from a fear among members of a group of reinforcing negative stereotypes about the intellectual ability of the group. The report identifies three randomized controlled trial studies that use classroom-based strategies to reduce stereotype threat and improve the academic performance of Black students, narrowing their achievement gap with White students.

"Research shows that students' mindsets about school can be changed*. When they are, students become more engaged. Their grades and test scores improve. But it is not always clear how to change mindsets effectively in different types of schools. That's where PERTS comes in. "

"Research shows that students' mindsets about school can be changed*. When they are, students become more engaged. Their grades and test scores improve. But it is not always clear how to change mindsets effectively in different types of schools. That's where PERTS comes in. "

Women taking a math test will perform worse when reminded that women aren't expected to do well in math. Social psychologist Claude Steele calls this an example of the "stereotype threat." In his book, Whistling Vivaldi, he lays out a plan to reshape those expectations. An interview with Claude Steele.

Strategies to mitigate stereotype threat among college students.

"Dartmouth Athletic Director Harry Sheehy, who appears twice in the video, is pleased that both current and former Dartmouth student-athletes are taking a stand against prejudice and intolerance. "We're very proud of the role that former Dartmouth athletes like Andrew Goldstein and Tanner Glass have played in raising the visibility of this issue, and this video gives our current student-athletes and staff a chance to voice our own strong support," he says. "As we watched the other videos and got to thinking about it, there are so many things student-athletes deal with," says Mark Hudak. "Some of it is sexual orientation, but there are also eating disorders, race, and religion, the list goes on and on. We didn't want to limit it to one thing." Student-athletes, coaches, and administrators quickly volunteered to appear in the video, speaking lines such as, "The color of your skin does matter. Your sexual orientation does matter. Your religious faith does matter, and so does your ethnicity.  They all matter to me because you're on my team.""

Too many Americans go through life terrified of equations and mathematical symbols. We think what many of them are afraid of is "proving" themselves to be genetically inferior by failing to instantly comprehend the equations (when, of course, in reality, even a math professor would have to read closely). So they recoil from anything that looks like math, protesting: "I'm not a math person."

Tiltfactor Laboratory's buffalo is a 20-minute card game for 2-8 players, ages 14 and older. It was created as part of a National Science Foundation-funded project to design and study games to combat implicit bias and stereotype threat against girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.

Creating a sense of belonging for all students in a classroom and at a school is essential to learning. What can leaders do to make students feel safe and welcome? What can teachers do to create an environment in which students feel supported, capable and competent? Based on Steele and Cohn-Vargas's book, Identity Safe Classrooms: Places to Belong and Learn, participants will study the concept of stereotype threat and then learn a set of behaviors that are within the teacher's and leader's spheres of influence and control in order increase identity safety for all students. Participants will learn how to Apply the concept of stereotype threat to their context Apply the key elements of the Identity Safe Classroom research to their context Refine their understanding of Dweck's growth mindset work and speak to how it connects to creating identity safe environments Thoughtfully choose from a variety of strategies for creating a sense of belonging in one's classroom, and also in one's school, one's department and/or grade level

"The summit kicked off with a wonderful keynote by Joshua Aronson who is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Education at New York University (NYU). Aronson studies stereotypes, self-esteem, motivation, and attitudes. He showed some remarkable research results that showed that when people are reminded of their race or gender in a testing situation where there is a negative stereotype, they do worse on the test. This is called Stereotype Threat - which he defined as being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group. The threat causes anxiety, and all kinds of measurable changes - from the brain to heart rate, and also greatly impacts test results. Simply putting a box to mark gender, for example, at the front of a math test significantly changed test scores - for both men and women. Compared to a test where gender was not asked for, if gender was asked for at the beginning of a test, boy's scores went up, girls' scores went down. If gender was asked at the end, boys' scores went down, girls' scores went up."