The recent posting on the Stanford study regarding the phenomenon known as stereotype threat and its role in California Exit Exam passage rates for young women and people of color generated significant traffic on this blog. For more on this subject, we suggest reading Stereotype threat widens achievement gap, a 2006 article in the American Psychological Association’s web-based compendium Psychology Matters (PM). The short piece focuses on the work of leading psychologists in this area, including Claude Steele, PhD. In a groundbreaking study done in 1995, Steele and Joshua Aronson, PhD, gave African-American and White college students with comparable SAT scores a half-hour test using difficult items from the verbal Graduate Record Exam (GRE). In the stereotype-threat condition, the researchers told students the test diagnosed intellectual ability, potentially eliciting the stereotype that African-Americans are less intelligent than Whites. In the no-stereotype-threat condition, the researchers told students that the test was merely a problem-solving lab task. Under the stereotype threat condition, African-Americans did less well than Whites. In the no-threat condition—the two racial groups performed equally. In a comparable experiment, Steele and other researchers tested women’s math test-taking performance with similar results.

The PM piece includes a reading list of journal articles on the studies described above and several more, including Improving adolescents’ standardized test performance: An intervention to reduce the effects of stereotype threat, a study co-conducted by Aronson that offers potential remedies to stereotype threat in standardized testing in middle-school students (e.g. pre-test mentoring by college students on the malleable nature of intelligence).

Regarding the body of research of stereotype threat over the last 15 years, the PM article concludes “the threat appears to be sufficiently influential to be heeded by teachers, students, researchers, policymakers and parents” and that “[a]t the very least, the findings undercut the tendency to lay the blame on unsupported genetic and cultural factors, such as whether African Americans ‘value’ education or girls can’t do math.”