Obama and the Stereotype Threat
A recent study showed a wonderful finding:
A performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.
The study has not been published yet–the report is from the New York Times, with hat tip to Andrew Sullivan’s blog. But the results are not actually that surprising.
There have been a number of studies in the last decade that show that what students think about their abilities has an influence on how well they do on tests. In the mid-1990s researchers Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson called the phenomenon the stereotype threat.
The idea is that when students are reminded of a negative stereotype–”math is hard for girls”, for example–the do worse than if they are not reminded about the stereotype. The effects of a stereotype can even be erased:
In a field experiment at a large public university, psychologists Catherine Good, Joshua Aronson, and Jayne Ann Harder administered an extra credit, pre-final practice exam to students enrolled in the terminal course of the most rigorous and fast-paced calculus sequence offered by the university, a course that satisfied degree requirements for math, science, and engineering degrees. These men and women were, by all accounts, in the pipeline for math and science careers. Students in the “gender nullifying” treatment read just a few extra sentences before taking their tests:
What about gender differences? This mathematics test has not shown any gender differences in performance or mathematics ability. The test has been piloted in many mathematics courses across the nation to determine how reliable and valid the test is for measuring mathematics ability. Analysis of thousands of students’ test results has shown that males and females perform equally well on this test. In other words, this mathematics test shows no gender differences.
In the control group, the test was administered under normal conditions, and women and men performed equally. But women who received the “gender nullifying” treatment (reading the statement above) outperformed men.
This is, of course, also part of what makes epistemic games so powerful. Epistemic games give players a chance to see themselves and competent and creative. They make it possible to have a overcome pre-existing stereotypes and replace them with more positive self-images. As I describe in more detail in How Computer Games Help Children Learn:
A key part of this development is acquiring what psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius call possible selves: “individual’s ideas about what they might become, would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming.” Possible selves give form to a person’s hopes for mastery, power, status, or belonging and to a person’s fears of incompetence, failure, and rejection. They are images of what we might become, but not generic images. They are images that a particular person has based on his or her own past experiences, hopes, dreams, and worries.
Epistemic games can give adolescents new possible selves that are based on authentic experiences with innovative thinking that matter in the world. Adolescents are in the process of working out exactly the kinds of identity issues that professional practica are all about: becoming a particular kind of person in the larger social world; learning to care about people and issues that matter to society at large; developing expertise and being respected for that expertise. An epistemic game gives players a chance to see themselves as innovative professionals—and, as in any practicum, to be seen by others as professionals.
Seen in this light, having an African American president surely gives African American students a powerful new “possible self”.
Come to think of it, having an African American president gives all of us a powerful new sense of a possible nation.
Hope indeed.
