The evidence is piling up against established assumptions that genes, race and/or gender determine a student's academic performance or how well he/or she does on standardized academic tests.

It has become apparent that negative stereotypes stir up doubts and anxieties in a test-taker's mind - keeping him/her from focusing on the test. This results in what psychologists call "stereotype threat."

Psychologists Claude Steele, PhD, Joshua Aronson, PhD, and Steven Spencer, PhD, discovered that even cursory reminders that a student belongs to a group that is traditionally regarded inferior in academics, spell trouble for the test-taker.

The researchers analyzed how group stereotypes threaten students' evaluation of themselves, which in turn, affects their academic "identity" and intellectual performance.

Stereotype threat, the researchers believe, can blight members of any group about whom negative stereotypes exist.

For their study, Steele and Aronson gave Black and White students a 30-minute test using challenging items from the verbal Graduate Record Exam (GRE). The students were divided into three groups.

• The stereotype-threat condition (group) was told that the test diagnosed intellectual ability, hence potentially educing the stereotype that Blacks are intellectually inferior to Whites.
• The no-stereotype threat condition (group) was told that the test was a problem-solving lab task that said nothing about intellectual ability, presumptively interpreting stereotypes as irrelevant.

The results showed that Blacks in the stereotype threat condition performed worse than Whites. It is important to note that Blacks were matched with Whites in their group by SAT scores.

On the other hand, Blacks in the no-stereotype-threat condition performed as well as the Whites. Other studies yielded similar results.

One study found that stereotype threat is so potent that when students merely recorded their race, Black students performed less well than Whites.

Spencer, Steele, and Diane Quinn, PhD, did a research on gender stereotypes this time, and found that women perform better simply by telling them that a math test does not indicate gender differences.

The researchers gave a math test to men and women. Half of the women were told that the test showed gender differences. The rest were told the opposite. The researchers found that women who were told that the test showed no gender differences performed as well as the men, while those who were told that the test did show gender differences did considerably worse than men. Women who were not told anything about the test did just as poorly.

Interestingly, the women in this experiment were top performers in math. On a similar note, students on the experiments on race were strong, motivated students.

Source: Psychology Matters