Stereotype Threat

Rising Above the Stereotype Threat - personal reflection by Satterwaite about his own school experience as an african american man in a predominately white academic environment as it relates to Steele's social-psychological concept of stereotype threat.

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.

"A 2010 research report by AAUW presents compelling evidence that can help to explain this puzzle. Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) presents in-depth yet accessible profiles of eight key research findings that point to environmental and social barriers - including stereotypes, gender bias, and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities - that continue to block women's progress in STEM. The report also includes up-to-date statistics on girls' and women's achievement and participation in these areas and offers new ideas for what each of us can do to more fully open scientific and engineering fields to girls and women."

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

"My colleagues and I have called such features "stereotype threat"-the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype, or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype. Everyone experiences stereotype threat. We are all members of some group about which negative stereotypes exist, from white males and Methodists to women and the elderly. And in a situation where one of those stereotypes applies-a man talking to women about pay equity, for example, or an aging faculty member trying to remember a number sequence in the middle of a lecture-we know that we may be judged by it."

"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."

his talk by Joshua Aronson, Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University, is part of "Women and STEM: How stereotypes undermine the interest and success of women in science, technology, engineering, and math," a Faculty Curator Speaker Series organized by Jenessa Shapiro, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at UCLA. This series addresses the question of why women continue to be underrepresented and underperforming in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math. Rather than focusing on possible biological or socialization factors, this series considers the role of stereotype threat. Speakers will present research demonstrating the emergence of stereotype threat in STEM domains, the mechanism that account for this phenomenon, and the ways in which we can intervene to prevent the deleterious influence of stereotype threat. The UCLA Center for the Study of Women is an internationally recognized center for research on gender, sexuality, and women's issues and the first organized research unit of its kind in the University of California system.

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

Dr. Aronoson's talk will focus on the ways that we as individuals and as a university community might reduce the effects of stereotype threat. Aronson asserts, "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." Aronson got his Ph.D. in Psychology at Princeton and currently is an Associate Professor of Psychology at NYU. His research has concentrated on"stereotype threat, and in particular the impact of well-known cultural stereotypes on the intellectual performance and academic motivation in black, Latino and female college students. You can learn more about Aronson at his website. Sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, and African and African-American Studies at Elon, with financial support from the Fund for Excellence in the Arts and Sciences. Special thanks to Dr. Buffie Longmire Avital, Department of Psychology.

"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."

"As so many studies have demonstrated, success in math and the hard sciences, far from being a matter of gender, is almost entirely dependent on culture - a culture that teaches girls math isn't cool and no one will date them if they excel in physics; a culture in which professors rarely encourage their female students to continue on for advanced degrees; a culture in which success in graduate school is a matter of isolation, competition and ridiculously long hours in the lab; a culture in which female scientists are hired less frequently than men, earn less money and are allotted fewer resources. And yet, as I listened to these four young women laugh at the stereotypes and fears that had discouraged so many others, I was heartened that even these few had made it this far, that theirs will be the faces the next generation grows up imagining when they think of a female scientist."

"Stereotype threat-performance-crippling fear of being judged based on cultural stereotypes-that often proves a heavy burden. Being an outsider, a Mexican woman in a mostly white business world, 'is always in the back of my head,' she says. 'I wonder, Am I not being heard because of who I am and how I am speaking? Am I being overlooked?"

"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.""

Strategies to mitigate stereotype threat among college students.

"An Education in Equality: Filmed over 13 years, this short film presents a coming-of-age story of an African-American boy who attends an elite Manhattan prep school."

How do I reduce the threat? "That's stereotype threat, and the chances are pretty good that being the only old lady in the class is going to hamper my ability to do my best on the exam, or even my ability to just focus well in lecture."

It isn't just that fewer women choose to go into fields involving science, engineering, technology and math. Even when they do and are successful, women are more likely than men to quit. Psychological research suggests the gender disparity may be, at least in part, the result of of a vicious psychological cycle.

Teachers College, Columbia University, is the oldest and largest graduate school of education in the United States, and also perennially ranked among the nation’s best. Its name notwithstanding, the College is committed to a vision of education writ large, encompassing our four core areas of expertise: health, education, leadership and psychology.

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