African-American Students May Improve Grades if Teachers Convey High Standards
WASHINGTON — African-American students who need to improve their academic performance may do better in school and feel less stereotyped as underachievers if teachers convey high standards and their belief that students can meet them, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
In three studies conducted at suburban or inner-city schools, African-American students improved their grades after receiving a simple, one-sentence note from their teachers or an online pep talk. The exercises were designed to dispel students’ fears that criticism of their academic work could be caused by different treatment of African-American students rather than their teachers’ high standards. The study was published online in August in APA’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
The findings contradict a common trend in education of praising students for mediocre work to help raise self-esteem before delivering critical remarks. That method may seem patronizing and could backfire and lower self-esteem, especially when white teachers praise African-American students, said lead researcher David Scott Yeager, PhD, an assistant professor of developmental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
“We’ve learned that self-esteem isn’t the key reason why African-American students fail to utilize critical feedback from their teachers. They may not always trust the person who is criticizing them,” Yeager said. “Our studies are the first test of whether this approach can increase students’ motivation in the real world.”
In the first study at a suburban public middle school in Connecticut, 44 seventh-grade students (22 African-American and 22 white) wrote an essay about a personal hero that was critiqued by their teachers for improvements in a second draft. The students were randomly assigned to two groups with the experimental group receiving a hand-written note with their critiqued essay that stated, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations, and I know that you can reach them.” The control group got a note that stated, “I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.”
For African-American students who received the high-expectations note, 71 percent revised their essays, compared to 17 percent in the control group. The findings were even more pronounced for African-American students who had reported low trust in their teachers in surveys, with 82 percent revising their essays in the high-expectations group, compared to none in the control group. White students who received the high-expectations note also were more likely to revise their essays, but the difference wasn’t statistically significant compared to the control group.
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2013/08/african-american-grades.aspx
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