Stereotype Threat

The faculty summer reading book at my school is "whistling vivaldi" by Claude M. Steele. I started it today and have read only the introduction, but already I'm hooked. The book is about how stereotypes affect our performance. It takes a little different approach though, by looking at what they call "stereotype threat" - the extra pressure people feel when they are in a situation in which they know their actions might confirm a stereotype. This is important to us as teachers, because no matter how fair and balanced we might feel that we are, we need to recognize that students feel this stereotype threat even when the stereotypes are not being actively enforced. A girl in my math class may feel the pressure of knowing that, if she messes up, it will just confirm the stereotype that girls are not good at math, like in this cartoon from xkcd.com:

The introduction to the book claims that the author will propose concrete ways to combat the effects of this stereotype threat, so I am hopeful that I'll have something more useful to post soon. The research that Steele mentions in the introduction is compelling. The study that prompted this book involved minigolf of all things. College students were asked to complete a minigolf course. Some students were just asked to play the course. Another group of students was told that the course was part of a test of Natural Athletic Ability. A third group of students was told that the course was part of a test of Intellectual Strategic Ability. Compared to the control group, white students' scores were several strokes worse when told that it was a test of athletic ability, while the negative effect on black students' scores was even worse when they were told it was a test of intellectual ability. There was no difference in the scores between the control group and either the white students in the intellectual task or the black students in the athletic task. There were no extra obstacles. Nobody told the black students they wouldn't do as well on the intellectual task, and nobody told the white students they wouldn't do as well on the athletic task. The difference seems to be that the white students put pressure on themselves not to mess up the athletic task and the black students put pressure on themselves not to mess up the intellectual task because they didn't want to confirm negative stereotypes. That's tremendous pressure to believe that your mistakes will reflect on your entire group! It's important that we teachers realize that being unbiased (as if that's humanly possible) is not enough. We need to actively fight these stereotypes if we are ever going to defeat them. Ignoring the problem won't make it go away!