Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (10 page)

One of the most interesting variations of this series of experiments has fascinating practical implications. In this experimental scenario, researchers asked one group of students to check off a box indicating racial-group membership before they took the test. In another version, every other condition was kept the same, except that the researchers omitted those boxes. Black students who had no box to check were more likely to perform at the same level as White students than those Black students who were asked to indicate their race by checking a box at the beginning. Presumably, the act of asking students to identify their race before the test began was sufficient to trigger the performance anxiety of stereotype threat and suppress the performance of the Black students participating in the experiment.

Of course, checking boxes is currently a routine part of the experience of taking standardized tests like the SAT. The gap in performance between Black and White students on such tests is common knowledge and routinely discussed in the national media. If the box checking suppressed African American student performance in the laboratory among high-achieving Stanford students, is it possible that the same thing happens in real-life test-taking situations? Why not offer the tests without asking for racially identifying information, or if such information is needed for data-collection purposes, wait until after the test is over to collect it—perhaps placing the demographic questions at the end? (I have made this suggestion to a colleague I know at the Educational Testing Service, the publisher of the SAT and similar tests, but I haven’t seen any movement in that direction.)

According to the work of Steele and Geoffrey L. Cohen and their associates, stereotype threat is most likely to impact high-achieving students who are highly identified with school. The dilemma may be particularly acute when students feel uncertain about their own ability or belonging. Many students experience this kind of uncertainty during their first year of college, so stigmatized students entering a new academic environment are particularly vulnerable to stereotype threat. Stigmatized students must face the threatening possibility that should their performance be inadequate, their failure will only underscore the racial stereotype of alleged intellectual inferiority.
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What does stereotype threat sound like in the real world, outside the experimental laboratory? Listen to these quotes from focus groups with first-year students of color at a predominantly White college, collected as part of a project I designed to assess intellectual engagement in that environment. Said one:

Another talked about the burden of representing her entire group:

The pressure not to prove the stereotype of intellectual inferiority means one cannot reveal weakness, or ask for assistance, even when justified in doing so, as this young woman explained:

What is hopeful about our new understanding of stereotype threat and related theories is that they can guide us to change how we teach and what we say. As Steele puts it: “Although stereotypes held by the larger society may be hard to change, it is possible to create educational niches in which negative stereotypes are not felt to apply—and which permit a sense of trust that would otherwise be difficult to sustain.”
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Receiving honest feedback that you can trust as unbiased is critical to reducing stereotype threat and improving academic performance. How you establish that trust with the possibility of stereotype swirling around is the question. The key to doing this seems to be found in clearly communicating both high standards and assurance of belief in the student’s capacity to reach those standards.

Again the work of Steele and Cohen offers important insights. To investigate how a teacher might gain the trust of a student when giving feedback across racial lines, they created a scenario in which Black and White Stanford University students were asked to write essays about a favorite teacher. The students were told that the essays would be considered for publication in a journal about teaching, and that they would receive feedback from a reviewer who they were led to believe was White. A Polaroid snapshot was taken of each student and attached to the essay as it was turned in, signaling to the students that the reviewer would be able to identify the race of the essay writer. Several days later the students returned to receive the reviewer’s comments, with the opportunity to “revise and resubmit” the essay. What was varied in the experiment was how the feedback was delivered.

When the feedback was given in a constructive but critical manner, Black students were more suspicious than White students that the feedback was racially biased, and consequently, the Black students were less likely than the White students to rewrite the essay for further consideration. The same was true when the critical feedback was buffered by an opening statement praising the essay, such as, “There were many good things about your essay.” However, when the feedback was introduced by a statement that conveyed a high standard (reminding the writer that the essay had to be of publishable quality) and high expectations (assuring the student of the reviewer’s belief that with effort and attention to the feedback, the standard could be met), the Black students not only responded positively by revising the essays and resubmitting them, but they did so at a higher rate than the White students in the study.
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The particular combination of the explicit communication of high standards and the demonstrated assurance of the teacher’s belief in the student’s ability to succeed (as evidenced by the effort to provide detailed, constructive feedback) was a powerful intervention for Black students. Describing this two-pronged approach as “wise criticism,” Cohen and Steele demonstrated that it was an exceedingly effective way to generate the trust needed to motivate Black students to make their best effort. Even though the criticism indicated that a major revision of the essay would be required to achieve the publication standard, Black students who received “wise criticism” felt ready to take on the challenge, and did. Indeed, “they were more motivated than any other group of students in the study—as if this combination of high standards and assurance was like water on parched land, a much needed but seldom received balm.”
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What, then, are the practical implications of Steele and his colleagues’ research? What are some specific strategies for teachers, mentors, and other adults to consider in an effort to reduce stereotype threat and increase trust in cross-racial interactions?

1. Make standards for evaluation explicit. Establish high standards and make clear to students what the criteria are for meeting them. When standards are made explicit, students are more likely to trust and respond to relevant criticism. Emphasize “effective effort” as the key to success, rather than “innate ability.”
   
2. Avoid overpraising for mediocre work. Students will perceive this as a sign of lowered expectations, and another reason not to trust the feedback.
   
3. Normalize help-seeking behaviors. For example, if all students are required to meet with the professor early in the semester or after the first exam, any stigma that students of color might feel seeking help outside of class is reduced.
   
4. When possible, include diversity of perspectives. Racial and cultural inclusivity in the curriculum and the teaching materials will communicate to the student that members of her group are valued and may increase the student’s sense of trust.
   
5. Encourage cross-group interaction in class. Consider assigning working groups rather than allowing students to choose group members themselves. Fostering interaction across racial lines or other lines of difference helps reduce stereotyping among classmates and increases the climate of trust in the classroom. However, clustering students of color within small groups is preferable to “tokenizing” them (placing no more than one student of color per group).
   
6. Revise your view of intelligence. Indeed, educators can revise their view of intelligence as an innate fixed capacity and can challenge those well-ingrained societal notions of racial hierarchies of intellectual ability. Students, too, can reevaluate their own assumptions about intelligence—not just other people’s intelligence but their own as well.
   

Many students, like many teachers, believe their intelligence (or lack of it) is a fixed, unchanging characteristic. Years of family members, friends, and teachers remarking, “What a smart boy/girl you are!” certainly reinforces this personal theory of intelligence. The alternate view of intelligence as changeable—as something that can be developed—is less commonly fostered, but can be. The educator Verna Ford has summed up this alternate theory for use with young children quite succinctly: “Think you can—work hard—get smart.”
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Research by the educational psychologist Carol Dweck suggests that those young people who hold a belief in fixed intelligence see academic setbacks as an indicator of limited ability. They are highly invested in appearing smart, and consequently avoid those tasks that might suggest otherwise. Rather than exerting more effort to improve their performance, they are likely to conclude, “I’m not good at that subject” and move on to something else. Students who have the view of intelligence as malleable are more likely to respond to academic setbacks as a sign that more effort is needed, and then exert that effort. They are more likely to face challenges head-on rather than avoid them in an effort to preserve a fixed definition of oneself as “smart.”
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The theory of intelligence as malleable—something that expands as the result of effective effort—fosters an academic resilience that serves its believers well.

The researchers Joshua Aronson, Carrie Fried, and Catherine Good wondered if a personal theory of intelligence as malleable might foster a beneficial academic resilience for students of color vulnerable to stereotype threat. Specifically, they speculated that if Black students believed that their intellectual capacity was not fixed but expandable through their own effort, the negative stereotypes that others hold about their intellectual ability might be less damaging to their academic performance. To introduce this alternative view of intelligence, they designed a study in which Black and White college students were recruited to serve as pen-pal mentors to disadvantaged elementary school students. The task of the college students was to write letters of encouragement to their young mentees, urging them to do their best in school. However, one group of college students was instructed to tell their mentees to think of intelligence as something that was expandable through effort, and in preparation for writing the letters, they were given compelling information, drawn from contemporary research in psychology and neuroscience, about how the brain itself could be modified and expanded by new learning. The real subjects of the study, however, were the college students, not their pen pals. Although the letter writing was done in a single session, the college students exposed to the malleable theory of intelligence seemed to benefit from exposure to the new paradigm. Both Black and White students who learned about the malleability of intelligence improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this information. The benefit was even more striking for Black students, who reported enjoying academics more, saw academics as more important, and had significantly higher grades at the end of the academic quarter than those Black students who had not been exposed to this brief but powerful intervention.
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What worked with college students also worked with seventh graders. Lisa Sorich Blackwell, Kali Trzesniewski, and Carol Dweck created an opportunity for some seventh-grade students in New York City to read and discuss a scientific article about how intelligence develops, and its malleability. A comparable group of seventh-grade students did not learn this information, but read about memory and mnemonic strategies instead. Those students who learned about the malleability of intelligence subsequently demonstrated higher academic motivation, better academic behavior, and higher grades in mathematics than those who had learned about memory. Interestingly, girls, who have been shown by Steele and his colleagues to be vulnerable to gender stereotypes about math performance, did equal to or better than boys in math following the “intelligence is malleable” intervention, while girls in the other group performed well below the boys in math. As was the case with the Aronson, Fried, and Good study, the intervention with the seventh graders was quite brief—in this case only three hours—yet the impact was significant.
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Embracing a theory of intelligence as something that can develop—that can be expanded through effective effort—is something that all of us can do to counteract the legacy of scientific racism, reduce the impact of stereotype threat, and increase the achievement of all of our students.