Negativ stereotypes affect learning as well as performance

[eridani]

http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/07/28/negative-stereotypes-shown-to-affect-learning-not-just-performance.html


Negative stereotypes not only jeopardize how members of stigmatized groups might perform on tests and in other skill-based acts, such as driving and golf putting, but they also can inhibit actual learning, according to a new study by Indiana University researchers.


While the effect of negative performance stereotypes on test-taking and in other domains is well documented, the study by social psychologist Robert J. Rydell and his colleagues in IU's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences is the first to show that the effects might also be seen further upstream than once thought, when the skills are learned, not just performed.

"The effect on learning could be cumulative," says Rydell, whose research focuses on stereotype threat involving women and mathematics. "If women do not learn relatively simple skills early on, this could spell trouble for them later on when they need to combine a number of more simple skills in new, complicated ways to solve difficult problems. For example, if a young girl does not learn a relatively simple principle of algebra or how to divide fractions because she is experiencing threat, this may hurt her when she has to use those skills to complete problems on geometry, trigonometry, or calculus tests."

This reduced learning may ultimately hamper efforts to help women enter into careers in science and mathematics, where they are currently underrepresented.

The study, "Stereotype threat prevents perceptual learning," was published on Monday (July 26), in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. Co-authors are Richard M. Shiffrin, Kathryn L. Boucher, Katie Van Loo and Michael T. Rydell, all from IU.

[noamnety]

1. This is one of the reasons that high stakes testing

does more harm than good. It doesn't just measure what students have learned. It causes actual harm/obstacles to learning in the populations that are most vulnerable.

[lumberjack_jeff]

2. The impact of stigmatization on education...

... and how it affects girls. *facepalm*

This is an excellent example of a preemptive defense against obvious. 80% of teachers are women as are 60% of college students. In 12th grade, only 28% of boys rate as proficient readers on federal tests, with girls pulling in at 44%. In 1997, 4,483 American young people between the ages of five and twenty-four killed themselves: 701 females and 3,782 males.

Boys are THE stigmatized group in US education.

[eridani]

3. Their findings apply to any stereotyped group n/t

[noamnety]

4. It doesn't appear that you understand stereotype threat.

It affects every group because it's a psychological phenomenon. Once a group is introduced to the notion that a particular group underperforms on a specific skillset, the members of that group will underperform.

The excerpt gave an example of girls and math to demonstrate what stereotype threat is.

[lumberjack_jeff]

5. Why use that example?

Boys underperform girls in every meaningful measure of educational fitness. That stigmatization is self-reinforcing, but it is manifestly impossible to sympathetically make the case with the patently obvious example of boys.

Ironically, it's impossible to use boys as an example precisely because they're the object of cultural stigma.

[noamnety]

6. "Sympathetically" - interesting word choice.

This is a scientific study. Fact based, whether or not you are sympathetic to its findings.

I agree with you that with a certain segment of the population will find it impossible to be sympathetic if girls are used as the example.


However, the real value of the study would be if educators (and those setting education policy, whom I would NOT call educators) understood how this affected their students and took meaningful steps to eliminate studies that - by their very nature - discriminate against those who are taught their demographic underperforms on particular tasks. I think some people believe that standardized testing is colorblind and gender blind, unless specific questions are phrased in ways that favor dominant cultures. It's more accurate to say that the testing process itself disadvantages certain groups.

[lumberjack_jeff]

7. Oh, I'm highly sympathetic to its findings.

I'm unsympathetic to the implications of the researchers' choice of example.

The fact that few boys will have any male teachers in their formative years shows boys that school is a "particular task" at which males underperform.

[eridani]

8. The research also could be used to underpin the hypothesis

--that stereotyping boys as non-verbal goof-offs is harmful to them.