Transcript STEMming the Tide

STEMMING
THE TIDE:
Coping with Stereotype
Threat In Math &
Science Learning
Matthew S. McGlone
Department of Communication Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
[email protected]
Prejudices, it is well known, are most
difficult to eradicate from the heart
whose soil has never been fertilized by
education; they grow there, firm as
weeds among the rocks.
- Charlotte Bronte (1851)
I told my literary agent I want to help
middle-school girls stay interested in
math and be good at it, and see it as
friendly and accessible and not this
scary thing. Everyone else in society
tells them it's not for them. It's for
nerdy white guys with pocket
protectors. This is how 75 percent of all
science is depicted on television.
The message they're getting instead is:
It's really cool to be dumb. Look at
Jessica Simpson. She's famous for
being dumb. I guess it started with
Marilyn Monroe, and she actually
wasn't that dumb, but that's how she
was perceived -- and that's what got
popular.
- Danica McKellar (2007)
Underachievement of
Black and Latino Students
Post-education: overrepresented in US Prison
population; clear link to underperformance
in school
College: approximately 1/2 as likely to go as
European American students; about 2x as
likely to drop out if they do
High School: high drop out rates; no
improvement since No Child Left Behind
K-12: Lower standardized test scores and
grades; gap widens as students
move through school
Underachievement of Girls and
Women in STEM Education
Graduate School: while outperforming men in all other
areas of academia, women earn less than 25% of
advanced degrees in STEM fields
College: women perform worse on standardized tests
of mathematics but do well in their courses; far fewer
choose STEM majors
Middle School: girls earn equally high grades but
begin to lose confidence in math abilities; test score
gap on standardized tests emerges
K-12: girls perform at or above the same level as boys
on tests and in school, but show less intrinsic interest
in spatial tasks and hypothetico-deductive reasoning
Common Explanations for Ethnic
Academic Achievement Gaps
Common Explanations for Ethnic
Academic Achievement Gaps
1. Lower innate intelligence of ethnic minorities
– Rushton (1984): more offspring / less nurturing  low intelligence
– Herrnstein & Murray (1989): The Bell Curve
– DNA pioneer James Watson (2008): “Gloomy prospects for Africa”
Common Explanations for Ethnic
Academic Achievement Gaps
1. Lower innate intelligence of ethnic minorities
– Rushton (1984): more offspring / less nurturing  low intelligence
– Herrnstein & Murray (1989): The Bell Curve
– DNA pioneer James Watson (2008): “Gloomy prospects for Africa”
2. Poverty  lower skills and preparation
Common Explanations for Ethnic
Academic Achievement Gaps
1. Lower innate intelligence of ethnic minorities
– Rushton (1984): more offspring / less nurturing  low intelligence
– Herrnstein & Murray (1989): The Bell Curve
– DNA pioneer James Watson (2008): “Gloomy prospects for Africa”
2. Poverty  lower skills and preparation
3. Cultures that encourage anti-intellectualism,
characterize academic success as “acting white”
Common Explanations for Sex-Based
STEM Achievement Gaps
Common Explanations for Sex-Based
STEM Achievement Gaps
1. Biology
•
•
Geary (1998): evolutionary pressures yield sexual dimorphism in
reasoning and communication abilities
Baron-Cohen (2001): prenatal testosterone levels shape male
(systemizing) vs. female (empathizing) brains
Common Explanations for Sex-Based
STEM Achievement Gaps
1. Biology
•
•
Geary (1998): evolutionary pressures yield sexual dimorphism in
reasoning and communication abilities
Baron-Cohen (2001): prenatal testosterone levels shape male
(systemizing) vs. female (empathizing) brains
2. Socialization
•
McGillicuddy-De Lisi (1998): girls receive less encouragement to
pursue STEM studies than boys
Common Explanations for Sex-Based
STEM Achievement Gaps
1. Biology
•
•
Geary (1998): evolutionary pressures yield sexual dimorphism in
reasoning and communication abilities
Baron-Cohen (2001): prenatal testosterone levels shape male
(systemizing) vs. female (empathizing) brains
2. Socialization
•
McGillicuddy-De Lisi (1998): girls receive less encouragement to
pursue STEM studies than boys
3. Nature-Nurture Interaction
• “…by nature implanted, for nurture to enlarge”
(Merchant Taylor’s School Headmaster Richard Mulcaster, 1581)
Human intelligence is among the
most fragile things in nature. It
doesn’t take much to distract it,
suppress it, or even annihilate it.
– Neil Postman (1990)
Social Factors Influence
Intellectual Performance
• Interpersonal “chemistry”
– rapport affects intellectual engagement in conversation; the more
comfortable we are in another’s presence, the more witty we appear
to them and to observers (McGlone & Aronson, 1997)
Social Factors Influence
Intellectual Performance
• Interpersonal “chemistry”
– rapport affects intellectual engagement in conversation; the more
comfortable we are in another’s presence, the more witty we appear
to them and to observers (McGlone & Aronson, 1997)
• Self-presentational concerns
– evaluation apprehension (Cottrell, 1972)
Social Factors Influence
Intellectual Performance
• Interpersonal “chemistry”
– rapport affects intellectual engagement in conversation; the more
comfortable we are in another’s presence, the more witty we appear
to them and to observers (McGlone & Aronson, 1997)
• Self-presentational concerns
– evaluation apprehension (Cottrell, 1972)
• Self-fulfilling prophecies
– Pygmalion Effect: Students’ academic performance influenced by
teachers’ positive or negative expectations (Rosenthal, 1968)
– Stereotype / Social Identity Threat
Stereotype/Social IdentityThreat
Psychological discomfort people experience when they are
concerned about a) being judged in terms of a negative social or
personal stereotype or b) doing something that would
inadvertently confirm the stereotype.
stereotype
is salient
resemble
stereotype
apprehension,
distraction
intellectual
disruption
Stereotype Threat Scenarios
girls, women taking math tests
black students making class
presentation to white students, teacher
men pursuing
nursing degrees
male prof lecturing on sexist
communication at Bryn Mawr
Stereotype Threat Scenarios
Dan Quayle, 1992
George W. Bush, 2008
The “Tongue-Tied Technocrat” Stereotype Threat
Hypothesis (Fallows, 2004; Aronson & McGlone, 2008)
Stereotype Threat and Speech Anxiety
Bush-Richards Debate, 1994
Bush-Kerry Debates, 2004
…in 1994, Bush was eloquent. He spoke quickly and easily. He rattled
off complicated sentences and brought them to the right grammatical
conclusions. He mishandled a word or two, but fewer than most people
would in an hour's debate. More striking, he did not pause before
forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new
ones. (James Fallows, Atlantic Monthly, 2004).
Stereotype Threat and
Academic Achievement
• ST is a situational phenomenon that can account
for a significant portion of ethnic and gender
gaps in test performance and academic
achievement.
• ST elicited by cues operating in the classroom
and/or testing context.
Cues to Stereotype Threat:
Test Framing
White
13
Black
10
7
4
1
Gender Differences in
Math Performance
Test Performance
(controlling for SAT)
Test Performance
(controlling for SAT)
Racial Differences in
Verbal Performance
100
Men
80
Women
60
40
20
0
Verbal Ability Class Exercise
Test Description
Math Ability
Problem
Solving
Test Description
Steele & Aronson (1995)
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Johns, Schmader, & Martens (2005)
Psychological Science
Cues to Stereotype Threat:
Identity Salience
woman
Latina
daughter
sister
aunt
Houstonian
UT student
biology major
athlete
girlfriend
Ascribed
Vs.
Achieved
Identities
Situationally salient
identity can boost
or impair intellectual
performance
Vandenberg Mental
Rotation Test (MRT)
• produces largest documented gender gap in any
cognitive ability (Halpern, 1992; De Lisi, 2001)
• a meta-analysis containing 286 data sets and 100,000
participants found a highly significant male advantage for
mental rotation (d = .9); this pattern remains stable
across age and has decreased little in recent years.
Identity Salience Influences Women’s
Mental Rotation Performance
25
WOMEN
MEN
MRT SCORE
20
15
10
5
GENDER
"ELITE COLLEGE" STUDENT
McGlone & Aronson (2006). Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
CONTROL
Identity Salience Influences Women’s
Mental Rotation Performance
25
WOMEN
MEN
MRT SCORE
20
15
10
5
GENDER
"ELITE COLLEGE" STUDENT
McGlone & Aronson (2006). Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
CONTROL
Identity Salience Influences Women’s
Mental Rotation Performance
25
WOMEN
MEN
MRT SCORE
20
15
10
5
GENDER
"ELITE COLLEGE" STUDENT
McGlone & Aronson (2006). Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
CONTROL
Cues to Stereotype Threat:
Recent Exposure to Stereotype Info.
Effects on Women’s
Career Preferences
Effects on Women’s
Leadership Preference
7
7
6
Role Preferences
Career Preferences
6
Language careers
Math careers
5
4
3
5
4
3
2
2
1
1
Neutral
Stereotypic
TV Commercials
Subordinate role
Leadership role
Neutral
Stereotypic
TV Commercials
Davies, Spencer, Quinn, & Gerhardstein (2002) Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Davies, Spencer, & Steele (2005) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Cues to Stereotype Threat
• Framing assessment as a measure of ability
• Stigmatized social identities made salient
• Recent exposure to stereotype information
ST effects shown for:
• All educational levels (elementary, middle, high
school, college)
• ethnic minorities AND majorities targeted by negative
intellectual stereotypes
• girls, women in STEM learning contexts
Conclusions from ~ 200 Published
Studies on Stereotype Threat
• Impairment occurs both on tests and in terms of GPA
• Impairment on tests results from anxiety, reduced working
memory capacity; impaired self-regulation; not typically a
function of giving up
• fMRI studies show that threat elicits high amygdala activation
• Can affect elite or non-elite students
• Can arise as a function of simply mixing students
• Leads women to express less interest in math and science, and
even bifurcate their identities
Strategies for Reducing Stereotype
Threat in STEM Learning
Reducing Stereotype Threat
Math Test Accuracy
(corrected for SAT)
Solution 1: Provide Role Models
Men
Women
20
15
10
5
0
Male Tutor /
Adminstrator
Female Tutor /
Adminstrator
Marx & Roman (2002)
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Reducing Stereotype Threat
Solution 2: Threat Inoculation through Education
• Train our educators to be ‘wise mentors’
– discuss, challenge stereotypes among students
– set high standards but assure students that they can meet them
• Emphasizing skill over ability
– highlight that learning is an incremental process
• Fostering a sense of belonging
– help students reappraise the meaning of adversity
Reducing Stereotype Threat
Solution 2: Threat Inoculation through Education
100
95
90
End of
85
the Year
80
Math Test
Performance 75
70
65
60
Males
Females
Intelligence is
Incremental
Experiencing
Difficulty is
Normal
Control
Type of Intervention
Good, Aronson, & Inzlicht (2003) Applied Developmental Psychology
Reducing Stereotype Threat
Solution 2: Threat Inoculation through Education
• Teaching our educators to be ‘wise mentors’
– speak out against the stereotype
– set high standards but assure students that they can meet them
• Emphasizing skill over ability
– highlight that learning is an incremental process
• Fostering a sense of belonging
– help students reappraise the meaning of adversity
• Unveiling the effects of stereotype threat
– point out that stereotype threat is an external explanation for anxiety
Accuracy on Math Items
Teaching about Stereotype Threat
Inoculates Students Against Its Effects
100
Men
Women
80
60
40
20
0
Math Ability Problem Solving Math Ability
Test
Task
Test + ST
Briefing
McGlone & Aronson (2007). Communication Education
Reducing Stereotype Threat
Solution 3: Recognize that Standardized Tests
are Two-Way Communication Channels
ETS Study: Asking Gender Before AP Calculus
Test Hurts Girls, Helps Boys (Stricker, 2004)
AP Formula Score
16
14
12
10
Female
Male
8
6
4
2
0
Inquiry Before
Inquiry After
Danaher and Crandall (2008)
Reanalysis of Stricker’s data
“Female students benefited substantially
on the calculus test when demographics
were asked after testing rather than before.
This simple, small, and inexpensive change
could increase U.S. girls receiving AP
Calculus credit by more than 4,700 every
year” (p. 293).
Implications For our Work as Teachers
• Understand and teach students that intelligence,
performance, motivation are fragile; learn to expect
ups and downs
• Teach students that their abilities can expand
• Expose students to role models who, like them,
experience difficulties but overcome
• Use cooperative group work; reduce competition
• Give feedback in ways that don’t undermine
motivation; high standards and support to meet
standards
Thanks!
Comments and questions are welcome! Please send
them to:
Matt McGlone
Department of Communication Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station A1105
Austin, TX 78712
e-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 512-471-1920