Reducing race-based and other group disparities in intellectual attainment, achievement motivation, and performance
This line of research addresses the ways in which social or group identity affects achievement motivation and plays a role in the academic underperformance of socially stigmatized groups. This research is currently being conducted in school settings as well as in laboratory experiments. In our work with schools, we have been successful in reducing the racial achievement gap by improving minority students’ grades and standardized test performance.
Improving grades. We recently completed two randomized, double-blind field experiments—each one involving over a hundred middle school students, 50% of whom were ethnic minority. This research was recently published in Science magazine (see Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, & Master, 2006). “Intervention-treated” middle school students completed a “self-affirmation” exercise. They wrote about a personally important value (such as their relationships with friends), whereas control students wrote about a personally unimportant value. We predicted that the treatment exercise would reduce the threat to social identity faced by negatively stereotyped minority students and thereby improve their performance (For a detailed explanation of this prediction see Social Identity Threat.) Both studies reduced the racial achievement gap in end-of-term grades: Whereas White students were unaffected by the intervention, Black students obtained significantly higher grades in the treatment condition than in the control condition. One particularly illustrative finding was that the intervention cut the number of Black students failing the course from 11% to 3%. This research constitutes one of the first psychologically based intervention studies, conducted in an actual academic setting, to reduce the racial achievement gap.
Improving standardized test scores. Initial analyses suggest that our intervention also improves standardized test scores of minority students. We are currently examining this result more closely and preparing to do a follow-up study in order to replicate this early result.
Chronic effects of social identity threat and mechanisms underlying long-term effects of social-psychological intervention. In general, we are interested in the chronic effects of threat and ways to address them. We seek not only to pinpoint the mechanisms affecting performance in single-shot evaluations, but also to understand the mechanisms sustaining threat over time, the opportunities for interrupting those mechanisms in the real world, and the consequences that can follow from such interruptions or interventions.
We are currently investigating the mechanisms by which such small interventions have non-intuitively large effects. In an initial effort, we used teachers’ grade-books to obtain a nuanced picture of how performance fluctuated over time as a function of race and intervention condition. As the term progressed, the performance of all students—but especially that of minority students in the control condition—deteriorated. (Suggesting a recursive link between threat and performance, self-reported stigmatization among minority students rose as their performance fell.) However, this downward trend was interrupted among minority students in the treatment condition. The performance of these students recovered sooner and then stabilized, such that they out-performed their peers in the control condition on the majority of subsequent assignments. Although the treatment effect on any individual assignment was small, these small effects accumulated over the academic term into a large effect on final grades.
Providing feedback across racial lines. In an early series of studies, we found that African American students responded less favorably to critical feedback when it was given by an ostensibly White professor, than did White students. However, when that same feedback was accompanied by a message that refuted the relevance of the negative stereotype—that is, by an invocation of high standards and by an assurance that the student in question had the ability to reach those standards—African American students responded as favorably as White students (in fact, slightly more favorably). This line of research has also found that female science majors, when given the same type of feedback on a research presentation, subsequently improved their performance to equal (indeed, slightly surpass) that of their male peers. The next step in this line of research is to evaluate their effects in actual classroom settings. We look forward to partnering with schools as we develop these techniques. See Cohen, Steele, & Ross (1999) for the complete published description of this research. See Cohen (in press) for a full discussion of the effectiveness of emphasizing high standards and assuring students of their ability to reach them.
Improving performance by boosting perceptions of belonging. From early infancy, humans are sociable, motivated to form and maintain positive social bonds—an adaptive tendency in the context of evolution. These bonds often form an important part of an individual’s social or group identity. Our research posits that, for these reasons, participation in most domains of human achievement demands heightened sensitivity to issues of social belonging, that is, to those issues related to the nature and quality of one’s social connectedness.
We are currently developing a theory of achievement motivation emphasizing the critical role of social belonging. In one illustrative line of studies, we have examined the effects of what we call mere belonging on motivation and performance (Walton & Cohen, 2007). We administer interventions that boost students’ perceptions of having a shared identity with others in a domain of achievement, such as a college major. Although small, such social-link manipulations consistently improve motivation and performance, sometimes dramatically.
For example, leading students to believe that they shared a birthday with a math major, or simply assigning them to a minimal group arbitrarily identified as the “numbers group” (versus assigning them the personal label of a “numbers person”), increased problem-solving persistence and even performance on a standardized math test. Indeed, even presenting an individual merely with the opportunity to form a social identity (rather than actually conferring one) is motivating. One study found that emphasizing the opportunities to form close ties with other people in the math department, relative to emphasizing the opportunities to attain skill mastery there, increased students’ persistence on an insoluble math puzzle by 40%. More strikingly, relative to a control condition, this sociability condition produced a small but statistically significant increase in the number of math classes students took later that year.
In another experiment, we provided college freshmen with information that would help ease their uncertainties about “belonging” in school. In the context of a one-hour study, they learned (via a presented survey) that upperclassmen of all ethnic groups had worried during their freshman year about whether they “fit in” and were accepted in college. Participants further learned that this worry subsided with time.
While the intervention, as predicted, had no consistent effect on White students, it led to a one-hour increase in the time African American students reported studying each day over the next 7 days. During the same period, the intervention also forestalled dips in African Americans’ sense of belonging: In the control condition, their self-perceived belonging in college fell steeply on days of stress. In fact, almost 60% of the day-to-day variance in African Americans’ felt belonging could be accounted for by the stressfulness of their day (compared with only 5% for White students). By contrast, for African Americans in the treatment condition, this figure fell to 24%. More dramatically, in spite of the intervention’s small size, it improved African Americans’ GPA the next year by roughly .3 grade points (almost the difference between a B+ and an A-)—virtually eliminating the race achievement gap among this group of students. See Walton & Cohen (2007) for a complete published description of this research.