Dr. Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University, says that a targeted classroom intervention closed the achievement gap for African-American students.
At the start of her lecture, Purdie-Vaughns noted that she was speaking on a “really difficult day in New York,” as hundreds of protesters marched on city streets protesting the decision of a Staten Island grand jury not to indict a White New York City police officer in the chokehold killing of an unarmed African-American suspected of illegally selling cigarettes.
In her presentation, Purdie-Vaughns showed how targeted classroom interventions can help eliminate stereotype threat among African-American students and close achievement gaps. Stereotype threat refers to a phenomenon among individuals to internalize feelings of inadequacy linked to negative stereotypes about groups they are identified with and subsequently live up to such stereotypes, leading to academic underperformance in a classroom setting.
Purdie-Vaughns’s research shines a light on the physiological effects of stereotype threat and effective ways of mitigating this phenomenon. A stereotype threat intervention Purdie-Vaughns and her colleagues experimented with was a 15-minute exercise in which a group of middle-schoolers were prompted to reflect on anxieties about intelligence, creativity, social acceptance, and other areas. The goal of this exercise was to lift the element of stereotype threat in an academic setting by zeroing in on and mitigating the negative impact of thoughts of self-doubt.
Purdie-Vaughns actually showed that, when stereotype threat is absent, cognitive activity is pronounced in various parts of the brain when working on a math problem, for instance. However, when an individual is confronted with a stereotype threat, i.e. a female working on a complicated math problem prompted to think she is not naturally disposed to excel in mathematics, cognitive function is most pronounced in one part of the brain, the ventral anterior cingulate cortex.
According to Purdie-Vaughns, that part of the brain “is implicated in social rejection. … It’s also implicated in sensitivity to negative information about the self, and we also know that it’s associated with clinical depression.” Under the influence of stereotype threat, “you’re actually not recruiting the parts of the brain that you need to recruit to learn.”
Purdie-Vaughns was able to show that a targeted affirmation exercise led to significant closing of the achievement gap between the Black and White middle-schoolers that made up a study she referenced—a letter-grade-and-a-half improvement for Black students. Furthermore, Purdie-Vaughns presented findings that indicated that an achievement gap was basically nonexistent when the performance of this group of students was gauged several years later in a college setting.
