User:RichardB44/sandbox

Group members: Richard Burnham and Nicole Dudley

Possible Topics: SAT scores influenced by stereotypes

Contribution Idea 1: On the the stereotype page section mitigation, add more strategies to reduce stereotype threat

5. Construct environments and have the physical objects in the environment not reflect one majority group. Researchers argued that individuals make decisions about group membership based on the group’s environment and proved that altering the physical objects in a room boosted minority participation. In this study, removing stereotypical computer science objects and replacing them with non-stereotypical objects increased female participation in computer science to an equal level as male peers.

6. Increase the representation of minority groups in that field can also mitigate stereotype threat. In one study, women in the STEM related field were shown a video of a conference with either a balanced or unbalanced ratio of men to women. The women viewing an unbalanced ratio reported a lower sense of belonging and less desire to participate. Decreasing cues that reflect only a majority group and increasing cues of minority groups can create environments that mitigate against stereotype threat.

7. Directly communicate that diversity is valued. One study revealed that a company’s pamphlet stating a direct value of diversity, compared to a color blind approach, caused African Americans to report an increase in trust and comfort towards the company.

8. Encourage people to reflect on their individual identities. Researchers also proved that encouraging women to think about their multiple roles and identities by creating self-concept map did equally well as men on a math portion of the GRE. Furthermore, women who did not create a self-concept map did significantly worse on the math test than men did. .

9. Promote cross- group relations between people of varying backgrounds. Research indicates that students have a lower sense of belonging at institutions where they are the minority. However, developing friendships with other racial groups alleviated against a sense of not belonging.

10. Teach students to re-evaluate stress and adopt an incremental theory of intelligence. One study found that having students reexamine their situation or anxiety can help their executive resources (attentional control, working memory, etc.), rather than allowing stress to deplete them, and improve test performance. Research has found that students who are taught an incremental view of intelligence do not attribute academic setbacks to their innate ability, but rather to a situational attribute such as a poor study strategy. As a result, students are more likely to implement alternative study strategies and seek help from others.

Contribution Idea 2: Gender Bias/stereotype threat in the SAT >>>

Researchers believe that the difference in scores for both race and gender is closely related to psychological phenomenon known as stereotype treat. Stereotype threat happens when an individual who identifies themselves within a subgroup of people, is taking a test and comes across a stereotype (usually of American origin) regrading their subgroup. This along with additional test anxiety, will usually cause a low test performance for that individual or group affected. This is because the individual is under increased pressure to overcome the stereotype threat and prove it wrong.This form of stereotype can be translated into a form of gender or race bias and is found in numerous SAT tests spanning throughout the years it has existed. Gender bias of the SAT tests can happen within certain sections which include the questions or passages themselves. This bias itself is usually for that against females. Specific examples of this can be seen in the demographics, verbal/reading and mathematics portions of the SAT tests.

For the Demographics example, students are often asked to identify their race or gender before taking the exam, just this alone is enough to create the threat since this puts the issues regarding their gender or race in front and center of their mind.

For the mathematics example, a question in the May 2016 SAT test involved a chart which identified more boys than girls in mathematics classes overall. Due to this, the girls taking the test might feel that they mathematics is not for them and may even feel as if they are not intelligent enough to complete to engage in mathematics and/or the question itself. This is also based off the common general stereotype that "men are better at math than women,"

For the verbal/reading example, a question in the May 2016 SAT test asked students to analyze and interpret a 19^th century polemic arguing that women’s place was at home. The reading passage itself was paired with 1837’s “Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism” by Catherine E. Beecher with a 183 reply from Angelina E Grimké who was an abolitionist at the time. The Beecher essays argued that women have a lower stature than men and are able to be their best when in domestic situations while Grimké argue that no one’s right’s should be crippled just because of their gender. The questions regarding the passages are considered by critics to be of mutual ground but it’s the placement of these passages that may have been the real issue. Since the passages were in the beginning it may have allowed this new information to linger in the minds of the test takers for the rest of their test taking time, especially the females who may now have the new thought as to not being intellectually competent of doing things other than house work and chores.

Studies suggest that teaching about stereotype threat might offer a practical means of reducing its detrimental effects. It can be shown when women were informed about stereotype threat problems in standardized tests, they tend to achieve higher scores. Thus, informing women about stereotype threat may be a useful intervention to improve their performance in a threatening testing situation. This is also known as a Stereotype threat#Mitigation. The main study that supports these findings comes from two well-known professionals on Education known as Claude Steele and Steve Spencer. For their study, they created a test which was a close replication to the math portion on SAT or GRE exams. With this test, one group from each gender would be given the test with an intro sentence.The other group within each gender would not be given this sentence. The sentence itself stated: you may have heard that women don't do as well as men on difficult standardized math tests, but that's not true for the particular standardized math test; on this particular test, women always do as well as men. The results were as follows: among participants who weren’t given the intro sentence, where the women could still feel the threat of stigma confirmation, women did worse than equally skilled men. But among participants who were given the intro sentence that stated the test did not show gender differences, where the women were free of confirming anything about being a woman, woman performed at the same high level as equally skilled men. Their under-performance was eliminated. In another study, researchers created a similar mock SAT math section exam which had both men and women complete difficult math problems described either as a problem-solving task or as a math test. In a third (teaching-intervention) condition, the test was also described as a math test, but participants were additionally informed that stereotype threat could interfere with women's math performance and that the threat itself shouldn’t be considered to be true for any woman. Results showed that women performed worse than men when the problems were described as a math test (where the stereotype threat was not discussed), but did not differ from men in the problem-solving condition or the men that learned about stereotype threat. For the women in the teaching-intervention condition in which they learned about the threat, they indeed had a greater overall performance than the women without this treatment.

General Findings of Research Studies