LEWISTON – Despite progress in understanding the performance differences between white and minority students in school, there is still a learning gap, a New York University associate professor told an audience at Bates College last week.
Professor Josh Aronson noted that the gap between the reading ability of white and black students increases as the students get older, so that a 13-year-old black child reads at the same level as an 8-year-old white one. Furthermore, minority students are half as likely to go to college and twice as likely to drop out once they are there, Aronson said.
The goal of his research for the past 10 years has been to explain this reality.
After showing that income, culture and other background factors don’t explain all of the gap, he offered three other explanations: interpersonal intimidation, “belongingness” and what he calls the Stereotype Threat.
Aronson’s lecture dealt primarily with this third explanation, the idea that stereotypes and people’s perceptions of these stereotypes drastically affect one’s intelligence.
“Individual human intelligence is fragile,” Aronson argued, and “it doesn’t take much to get people’s intelligence suppressed.”
As an example, Aronson said that President Bush, much maligned in the media for his difficulties when speaking in public situations, was an excellent public speaker during his Texas gubernatorial race.
When linguists compared Bush’s speeches from the two periods, they remarked that it was “two completely different people.”
Aronson attributed the change to the fact that there were “no rumors of his stupidity until after he won the gubernatorial race.” When those rumors did surface, Bush tried so hard to fight the stereotype that he constantly tripped himself up.
“The Stereotype Threat can make us less intelligent even if we are very intelligent,” Aronson said.
This theory can be equally applied to students because groups who think they should do poorly, such as minority students, invariably do.
Aronson cited a number of studies in which he and other colleagues demonstrated that if the idea of stereotypes was removed from a testing situation, minority students performed on par with white students.
Those findings encouraged Aronson to believe that teachers and administrators should strive to “change the social atmosphere of the classroom.” Only then will minority students be in a situation that allows them to perform as well as whites, he said.
Aronson’s lecture was the second in a series exploring the 50-year legacy of the Brown vs. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Comments are no longer available on this story