The threat of stereotype in educational leadership

FALUDI

If You Believe Then You Can Achieve: Stereotype Threat Analysis

Essentially, the overarching point of Joshua Aronson's article entitled "The Threat of Stereotype" is to evaluate means of reducing the performance gap that traditionally exists between male Caucasian students and disparate groups of minorities including African-Americans, Latinos, and women in fields of mathematics. Aronson's primary method for achieving this goal is through an analysis of a phenomenon known as stereotype threat, a syndrome that occurs when people of certain demographics are put in academic situations in which they feel a sense of anxiety due to negative perceptions of the intellectual capacity of their demographic. The author not only demonstrates a number of examples in which this phenomenon actually occurs, but he examines why stereotype threat has a negative influence on academic performance, and even offers a number of solutions that can potentially help overcome it -- and help to reduce the gap in achievement between different stratifications of people.

One of the most effective demonstrations of the presence of stereotype threat and its negative effect upon people was dramatically demonstrated by a study in which two different sets of classes took the same test. One group served as a control, while the other group was informed that the test was not a measure of ability. Convincingly, African-American students in the latter group scored nearly twice as well as the control (Aronson 2004) -- which demonstrated the fact that the negative academic performances related to stereotype threat are psychological in nature and not accurate indicators of the aptitude of certain groups. The author explores the myriad ramifications of this finding throughout the duration of the article's remainder, in which he proves that this phenomenon can be induced in even the most elite group of demographics and that the conventional reasons ascribed to the underachievement of certain minority groups -- which have typically been assumed to just not be intellectually capable -- may in fact be wrong.

The most interesting part of the article, however, occurred towards the end when the author began exploring methods in which educators could actually use the psychology responsible for stereotype threat to their advantage. Viable solutions included allowing students to work in group settings, which discouraged competition and encouraged cooperation, as well as teaching students in smaller classrooms that facilitated greater amounts of intimacy and teacher-student interaction. However, in keeping with the psychological nature of stereotype threat (in which students who care the most about their academic performance and are aware of the magnitude of a particular assignment/examination get the most anxiety about their demographics traditional underachievement in such settings and hence perform poorly) the most fascinating solution was equally psychological in nature. It involves either education students about this particular phenomenon and acknowledging its presence to reduce its efficacy, as well as teaching students that their intellectual aptitude is not limited to a stereotype and can be expanded and increased through practice and use, much like other facets of the physical body.