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>Educational Materials Can Induce Stereotype Threat in Elementary School Students: Evidence for Impaired Math Performance Following Exposure to a Token
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Educational Materials Can Induce Stereotype Threat in Elementary School Students: Evidence for Impaired Math Performance Following Exposure to a Token
- With this experiment, we tested the hypothesis that qualifying important inventors as "African American" during a classroom activity would induce stereotype threat in African American children. Stereotype threat is a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals underperform on academic tasks when subtly or subconsciously reminded of their group membership before beginning the activity. It appears that reminding a person that they belong to a group about which society holds negative stereotypes (such as girls in math or African Americans in academic settings in general) creates extra pressure on the individual to disconfirm these stereotypes. This pressure is an added cognitive burden that reduces the individual's performance on the academic task. In our study, we designed an activity about important American inventors for 6 to 9 year olds at an afterschool program in the US. Our experimental group read about 4 "important American inventors" including one "important African American inventor," while our control group read about "important American inventions" and did not receive any information about the inventors' race. The students who were exposed to the token attempted fewer math problems and completed fewer problems correctly than students in the control group, but no differences were found between the groups on attitudes toward academic achievement. This study suggests that common classroom materials that highlight race could have the unintended consequence of inducing stereotype threat in students.
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