Black-White Achievement Gap

September 5 2006 - An in-class writing assignment designed to boost students' sense of identity and personal integrity reduced the achievement gap between African-American and non-minority students by 40 per cent, according to a new study by associate professor Geoffrey Cohen of Colorado and Julio Garcia of Yale universities and their colleagues.

The authors suggest that this classroom intervention is among the first aimed purely at altering psychological experience to reduce the racial achievement gap, which they describe as a 'major problem in the United States'. They found that it benefited the targeted students, reducing group-based inequality while not adversely affecting non-targeted students.

Geoffrey Cohen said:

"Our research was based on the idea that ethnic minority students experience, on average, higher levels of stress in the classroom. This is because they are concerned that if they do poorly it could confirm the negative stereotype about the intellectual ability of their racial group. We all know from personal experience that too much stress is bad for performance."

According to the authors, previous research has found that school settings are stressful to many students regardless of race. However, many African-American students experience chronic stress in school stemming from negative stereotypes portraying them as less intelligent than their peers. This in turn leads to decreased academic performance.

The study involved two experiments in which seventh graders from middle-class and lower middle-class families were asked to choose one or two values that were important to them and then to write a paragraph describing why. A control group was asked to write about values that others might hold. A total of 243 students participated, approximately evenly divided by race.

Geoffrey Cohen commented:

"This exercise, called a self-affirmation, allows a student to reaffirm that he or she is a good person. That helps fight the stress arising from the fear that the negative stereotype could be used against you."

The study found the average performance gap in the course between African-American students and their white peers at a suburban middle school in the north-eastern United States was three-quarters of a grade point on a four-point scale for those in the control group. The African-American students who completed the in-class assignment improved their end-of-term grades by three-tenths of a grade point, closing the gap by 40 per cent. The assignment had no impact on white students' grades.

Geoffrey Cohen said:

"We don't really know how these results will transfer to other schools and areas in the country, or know conclusively what the psychological mechanism behind this is. However, it may turn out that if we intervene earlier, the gap could be reduced even more. We think there are many educational practices and programs, both governmental and private, whose true positive impact is being masked by psychological factors in the environment that interventions such as ours can help to alleviate."

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