[Vision2020] New Scientist: The curse of being different

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The curse of being different
  a.. 13 January 2007 
  b.. From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. 
  c.. Robert Adler 
THE achievement gap between white and non-white students - indeed between any marginalised group and the mainstream - is one of the most worrying and deep-seated problems in the US educational system. It is conspicuous from pre-school to college and has resisted decades of massive and costly educational reforms.

The problem stems in part from the stereotypes that society applies to such groups, which can make individuals painfully aware of how critically they are viewed and can have a crippling impact on their performance. Any situation that reinforces the stereotype - even something as simple as checking off one's race or gender before a test - can threaten a person's sense of themselves as good, competent and valued, which in turn raises anxiety.

For many African Americans, women and members of other marginalised groups, that anxiety can surge to performance-wrecking levels in class or during exams. Researchers have found that students who repeatedly encounter situations like this become frustrated and soon learn to avoid them. This is why many young women come to shun mathematics, sciences and engineering, and why so many African Americans disengage from academic pursuits entirely.

The good news is that psychologists are having considerable success tackling these problems, by developing simple interventions that strengthen students' social identities instead of threatening them. One of the most dramatic examples was demonstrated recently by social psychologist Geoff Cohen at the University of Colorado, Boulder (Science, vol 313, p 1307). Early in the school year, his team asked a group of African American 12 and 13-year-olds to spend a few minutes examining a list of values, based on things such as friendship and family, and to indicate which they felt were most important. The students then wrote a short paragraph explaining why they felt the values they had chosen were meaningful to them.

This self-affirming exercise took just 15 minutes, yet it had a remarkable impact. Compared to their peers, these students showed more resilience in the face of failures and earned higher grades throughout the term. The exercise reduced the achievement gap between them and white students by 40 per cent. Given how deep-seated the racial achievement gap appears to be, this success seems astonishing. "It's a dramatic piece of evidence," says Claude Steele of Stanford University in California, who has devoted much of his career to trying to ameliorate the effects of negative stereotypes on stigmatised groups.

Other intervention experiments have had similar results. Between 2003 and 2006 Ilan Dar-Nimrod and Steven Heine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, tested the mathematical ability of 220 female college students (Science, vol 314, p 435). Before taking a maths test similar to one used by many colleges to screen applicants to graduate programmes, some of the women read passages arguing that there are fixed gender differences in mathematical ability, while others read that differences in ability can be modified by experience. The researchers predicted that viewing ability as changeable would make it easier for women to overcome the negative stereotype that paints maths as a predominantly male pursuit.

They were right: the "changeable" intervention raised women's maths scores by an astonishing 50 per cent. Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University who has developed a range of exercises that enable students from many different backgrounds to perform better, says that a number of recent studies show similar effects, "far beyond what you might expect from the simplicity of the interventions". Julio Garcia at Yale University describes the techniques as a light switch that releases the motivation and abilities students had all along.

Clearly it is time to apply this approach more widely, though as the researchers point out it will not cure all the ills in the US educational system. The long-standing financial and structural problems also need to be addressed. "If the resources aren't there to begin with, this kind of intervention cannot work," says Cohen. "It won't teach a child to read or to spell."

While the structural problems may take decades to address, psychological interventions can help students today. "A key question is how to transform these scientific findings into something that can have widespread use," says Jeffrey Hausdorff at Harvard Medical School. This could quickly be done. If dozens of small experiments had shown that a vaccine could protect children from a potentially crippling disease, it goes without saying that millions of dollars would be invested in large-scale studies and any successful treatment made universally available.

It is time to recognise that psychologists have developed just such a "vaccine", with the potential to immunise young people against a condition that cripples the lives of millions. It's high time we applied it.

>From issue 2586 of New Scientist magazine, 13 January 2007, page 17
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