Steele explains that students who are threatened with a negative stereotype about their social group (i.e. the insidious belief that girls are not good at math) tend to underperform. The negative effects prove all the more heightened when the student feels very invested in his/her success and wants to do well, as is the case with the SAT. However, in an experimental group, when female students were told that women did as well as men on a specific math test, they performed on par with their male counterparts, thus diminishing the effect of the negative stereotype. Steele found that stereotype threat also has effects on a racial level when testing black and white students. When black students were told that the test they were about to take was an IQ test to be measured against white students, they underperformed. Conversely, when black students were told that the exact same test was a puzzle, and not a measure of intelligence, they outperformed white students by a wide margin. This shows that the stereotypes carry no substantial weight or merit: women are not worse than men at math, black students are not less intelligent than white students, etc. Yet, it is in students’ blind acceptance of these stereotypes–the process by which they assimilate them into their self conceptions and identify themselves with such logic-defying limitations–that causes negative stereotypes to manifest in our reality. Students then find their academic performance hampered by FEAR, False Evidence Appearing Real, instead of goaded by the qualities that lend themselves to our success: be it curiosity, potential ability, and overriding confidence.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 08:35:55 +0000
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