Today's SAGE musings is about stereotype threat. When I first heard about this phenomenon, I found it rather shocking... and yet, I saw it in my classes.

It's a very simple phenomenon: when students are reminded of stereotypical beliefs about how their race/ethnicity/gender affects their abilities just prior to completing a task, it affects their performance. Dramatically. And the reminder can be almost unnoticeable. For example, identifying oneself as belonging to a particular group (filling out a demographic form prior to taking the SAT, for example), reminds the test-taker that they belong to that group. Identifying oneself as female before taking a test of spatial thinking skills will, on average, lower the test-taker's score on the test. This is why psychologists now put demographic surveys *after* any skills tests, in their research studies.

To learn more, see

• Our SAGE 2YC pages on Stereotype Threat, including the page on mitigating the impacts
• An Atlantic article about Claude Steele's research: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/08/thin-ice-stereotype-threat-and-black-college-students/304663/
• A blog post from Discover magazine about using a 15-minute writing assignment to overcome stereotype threat: (link unavailable)

Or dig a bit deeper, with the short article (Walton, 2009), describing a meta-analysis of studies of nearly 19,000 students. I remember a female student citing research to me about women having weaker math skills than men. She hadn't considered the effects of individual differences and effort. I'm curious to know how many of you have observed your students struggling against or seeming to given in to stereotypes about their abilities. Do you see stereotypes affecting your students' self-images or self-confidence? Do you have strategies for addressing those situations, preemptively or in the moment?

How can we help our students see past the stereotypes?

Reference:

Walton, Gregory M. and Steven J. Spencer, 2009. Latent Ability: Grades and Test Scores Systematically Underestimate the Intellectual Ability of Negatively Stereotyped Students. Psychological Science, v. 20, n. 9, pp. 1132-1139.