Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Affirmation of Worth Boosts Scores of Black Children

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Affirmation of Worth Boosts Scores of Black Children: "SCIENCE NEWS
August 31, 2006
Affirmation of Worth Boosts Scores of Black Children
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Image: ©TOM AND DEE ANN MCCARTHY/CORBIS

African-American schoolchildren who completed a brief writing assignment designed to reaffirm their sense of self-worth received higher grades at the end of the semester than those given a control intervention, a new study finds. These better-performing children closed the grade gap with their white peers by 40 percent, apparently because the assignment interrupted the harmful effects of declining performance early in the semester.

Researchers have invoked a concept called stereotype threat to help explain why black students in the U.S. consistently perform worse in school than their white counterparts. In this view, members of a minority experience anxiety at the prospect of confirming negative stereotypes about their group, such as low intelligence. This anxiety impedes their performance in tasks that reflect on the stereotype, creating a downward spiral in which anxiety and poor performance feed on one another. In past experiments college students have been told that a test they are about to take is "