Running Head: WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 1 Reducing the Achievement Gap: Why Are Self-Affirmation Interventions Effective?

The achievement gap between White and Black students and White and Latino students remains one of the largest issues in education today despite countless efforts to reduce it. Previous reforms have focused on school-centered initiatives such as improving teacher quality or expanding Pre-Kindergarten programs. While these attempts are laudable, they have not found great success. However, recent trends in social-psychological research have pointed to studentcentered intervention strategies that are subtle but powerful and that have achieved long-lasting effects like heightened GPA and standardized test scores. These strategies are appealing because they are inexpensive, simple, and easy to execute. The present review focuses on a selfaffirmation intervention strategy that has been shown to mitigate the effect of stereotype threat and thus diminish the achievement gap. In order to understand this intervention, the paper merges the literature on stereotype threat and the literature on self-affirmation to shed light on how the processes interact. More specifically, the review explores how self-affirmation, in the form of values affirmation exercises, disrupts negative self-reinforcing recursive processes that inhibit success in school for minority students. Self-affirmation reduces the stress students experience in psychologically threatening situations and frees up cognitive resources to focus on the task at hand, thereby beginning an alternative recursive cycle that leads to greater success in school. The paper reviews studies on self-affirmation interventions that have been both successful and unsuccessful at lessening the achievement gap. Finally, future research directions and implications for schools are conveyed. WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 3 Reducing the Achievement Gap: Why Are Self-Affirmation Interventions Effective? The achievement gap between White and Black students and White and Latino students continues to plague our country, systemically undermine the success of thousands of students, and hinder our global competitiveness. The “achievement gap” points to the persistent disparity in educational outcomes between minority and/or low-income students and their White and Asian counterparts (National Education Association, 2015). According to National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) data, the difference in average math and reading scores between European Americans and African Americans was virtually unchanged between the early 1990s and 2007 (Vanneman, Hamilton, Baldwin Anderson, & Rahman, 2009). Data from the 2011 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) show that the Black-White achievement gap persists by as many as 18 to 26 points on a 500-point scale score, even when controlling for socioeconomic status (Bohrnstedt, Kitmitto, Ogut, Sherman, & Chan, 2015). More recent data shows that the achievement gap in some school systems is as large as 1.2 standard deviations, with the average across the United States at roughly 0.5 to 0.7 standard deviations (Reardon, Kalogrides, & Shores, 2017). The gap in achievement is not only problematic for low-income and minority students, but also for the United States as a whole because it is detrimental to our global competitiveness. On the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), students in the United States fell behind at least 20 other countries including Finland, South Korea, and Canada (NCES, 2015). The scores on these international exams will not significantly improve until the achievement gap lessens. Therefore, even minor changes to the achievement gap can have significant consequences at many levels. Given the magnitude of the problem and the variety of systemic factors that contribute to its scope and persistence, there is no singular remedy that will eradicate the achievement gap. WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 4 Previous efforts have largely focused on school-centered initiatives such as improving teacher training, instructional materials, and expanding Pre-K programs (Wilson & Buttrick, 2016). While these efforts are important and have great potential to alter educational outcomes, past attempts have largely failed to make a noteworthy impact as the achievement gap has not significantly changed since the 1980s (Barton & Coley, 2010). Since students are not just passive recipients of knowledge and successful learning depends on much more than quality of services (Wilson & Buttrick, 2016), it is worth exploring how nuanced student-centered approaches may find greater success in diminishing the achievement gap. Social-psychological research has uncovered promising intervention strategies that are student-centered and can lead to large gains in achievement (e.g., Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, & Master, 2006). These interventions target students’ beliefs, construals, and interpretations of events in order to make them more adaptive. Unlike traditional educational interventions that focus on academic content, these psychological interventions are designed to change students’ thoughts and feelings in and about school (Yeager & Walton, 2011). Examples of such interventions are those designed to teach students that poor academic performance is normal in the transition to a new school and that grades typically improve after the transition (Wilson & Linville, 1982) or interventions that encourage students to view intelligence as malleable instead of fixed (Dweck, 2006). These subtle yet powerful interventions are appealing because they are simple and inexpensive to execute, and they can have significant and lasting effects. Effects in the short-term result from targeting students’ subjective perceptions of experiences in school. Effects in the long-term come from changing the course of recursive processes, or selfreinforcing processes that accumulate effects over time (Yeager & Walton, 2011). Yeager, Walton, and Cohen (2013) proposed that psychological interventions raise student achievement WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 5 by: 1) influencing students’ construals of themselves and the classroom, 2) using delivery tactics grounded in psychological research, and 3) tapping into self-reinforcing or recursive processes. The current paper focuses on a specific type of social-psychological intervention – a values affirmation intervention proven to mitigate the effect of stereotype threat and subsequently diminish the achievement gap. The seminal intervention study of this nature was conducted by Cohen et al., (2006). In a double-blind randomized controlled experiment, the researchers tested whether psychological threat could be lessened by having students reaffirm their sense of personal adequacy or “self-integrity.” Middleto low-income 7 graders in a racially diverse school were provided with a list of 12 values (e.g., relationships with friends/family, being good at art, religion) and were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. The students in the experimental condition were asked to choose the two or three values most important to them and then write a paragraph about why they were important to their lives. The students in the control condition chose their least important values and wrote about why someone else might find those values to be important. The research team found that the brief in-class writing assignment significantly improved the grades of the African American students in the experimental condition and reduced the achievement gap by 40%. Participation in the affirmation yielded no effect on the grades of White students, suggesting that self-affirmation reduced stereotype threat among Black students or at least bolstered dimensions of their selfworth that helped reduce their stress levels and thereby facilitated performance. Two years later the authors conducted a follow-up study to see if the results persisted (Cohen, Garcia, Purdie-Vaughns, Apfel, & Brzustoksi, 2009). While some psychological interventions have only short-term impact, this particular intervention demonstrated a lasting impact two years later, especially for low-achieving African American students. Over the two WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 6 years between studies, the GPA of African American students was, on average, 0.24 points higher than that of control group African American students. The intervention also lessened the likelihood of affirmed students being assigned to a remedial track. This seminal study demonstrated the potential long-term impact of psychological interventions as a means to reduce the achievement gap. Following the Cohen et al. (2006) study, many other researchers have explored values affirmation as a means to mitigate stereotype threat and have examined the success of the intervention in different contexts (e.g., Cook, Purdie-Vaughns, Garcia, & Cohen, 2012; Sherman et al, 2013). The current paper will review the literature on stereotype threat and self-affirmation, and then examine how these separate processes interact. The paper looks at both successful and unsuccessful affirmation interventions in the classroom in order to further understand how and why they work and to suggest further studies. Given the subtle yet powerful nature of the intervention, there are clear implications for policymakers and educators to execute the intervention. Stereotype Threat Stereotype threat is the risk of confirming, as a self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group (Steele & Aronson, 1995). The term was coined more than two decades ago when Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson sought to uncover an explanation for the long-standing finding that African American students underperform on standardized tests. They hypothesized that African Americans underperformed when they were aware that failure could reinforce a negative stereotype, interfering with the intellectual functioning of these students, particularly during standardized exams. In the first of several studies, African American college students performed worse than White peers on standardized tests when the exams were presented to them WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 7 as diagnostic of their ability and when students were asked to report their race beforehand. Students in the control condition were told they were completing an exercise in problem solving. In the diagnostic condition, African American students performed significantly worse than White students. However, African American students in the control condition performed as well as control-condition Whites, and better than their African American counterparts in the diagnostic condition. Steele and Aronson reasoned that when exams were presented as diagnostic of ability, knowledge of prevalent cultural stereotypes asserting intellectual inferiority of African Americans triggered fear of confirming the stereotypes, and interfered with student performance. In a series of follow-up studies, Steele and Aronson (1995) found that even when tests were not presented as diagnostic of ability, the salience of negative stereotypes still impaired performance. Simply by indicating race on an exam, African American students did worse than their White counterparts. However, when students did not indicate their race, African Americans performed as well as White students. Regardless of how the stereotype was primed, being confronted with the threat of confirming negative stereotypes impeded the performance of African American students. Following Steele and Aronson’s original study, hundreds of others have demonstrated how negative stereotypes about intellectual ability impact the performance of those in stereotyped groups including Black, Latino, female, and low-income students (for a review, see Nguyen & Ryan, 2008). Spencer, Steele, and Quinn (1999) found that when negative stereotypes about women’s math abilities were made explicit beforehand, women underperformed relative to their potential on quantitative tasks in relation to men. Women did not underperform, however, when stereotypes were presented as irrelevant to the task. Even groups who typically benefit from privileged social status can be made to experience stereotype threat. For example, White WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 8 men performed worse on a math test when they were told their performance would be compared with that of Asian men (Aronson et al., 1999). Additionally, Whites performed worse than Blacks on a motor task when it was described to them as measuring their natural athletic ability (Stone, 2002). Psychological Processes Underlying the Effect of Stereotype Threat In order to reduce the impact of stereotype threat, it is imperative to understand the psychological processes underlying its effects. Schmader, Forbes, and Johns (2008) developed an integrated process model of stereotype threat in which motivational, affective, physiological, and cognitive processes interact to hinder performance (see Figure 1). As shown in the model, stereotype threat induces physiological stress responses, negative emotion regulation, and monitoring processes. When a person experiences negative emotion regulation, the person uses suppression processes to deal with it, further encouraging physiological stress responses and monitoring processes, and thereby consuming mental resources. Altogether, these responses diminish working memory efficiency and hinder performance on cognitive and social tasks that require effortful processing. Working memory efficiency is essential to perform well in school. As such, students cannot perform to their highest potential when they experience stereotype threat. Performance on more automatic sensorimotor tasks is stunted as well, specifically by the monitoring processes. Another consequence of stereotype threat that is not explicitly demonstrated in the model is the increased likelihood of exhibiting a prevention focus, i.e., a mindset in which one works vigilantly to prevent negative outcomes instead of working toward achieving positive ones (Higgins, 1998). A prevention focus is less adaptive in gains-focused evaluative settings where WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 9 students work to achieve their highest performance levels; cognitive processes associated with a promotion focus are better-suited to performance on tasks in school (Seibt & Forster, 2004; Grimm et al., 2009). Students who exhibit a promotion focus instead of a prevention focus are more focused on learning instead of performance and are therefore less likely to experience the anxiety associated with performance. Promotion-focused students are also more oriented toward mastery of material. Although the Schmader et al. (2008) model does not mention prevention focus and is not entirely comprehensive because it fails to account for processes that occur prior to stereotype threat, it effectively summarizes how stereotype threat disrupts performance via three mechanisms: 1) psychological stress response that directly impairs prefrontal processing; 2) the tendency to actively monitor performance; and 3) efforts to suppress negative thoughts and emotions in the service of self-regulation. These mechanisms consume all of the executive resources needed to perform well on cognitive and social tasks. Furthermore, Schmader et al. (2008) proposed that all stereotype-threat relevant situations involve activation of three core concepts: the concept of one’s ingroup, the concept of the ability domain in question, and one’s self-concept. The way one sees the relation between these three concepts influences one’s experience of stereotype threat. For example, a student may think the following: My group has this ability; I am like my group; I have this ability. Another might also think the opposite: My group does not have this ability; I am like my group; I do not have this ability. Stereotype threat comes from a situationally-induced state of imbalance between these three core concepts, so the second student is experiencing stereotype threat because there is an imbalance in that thought. Stereotype threat is triggered by situations that pose a threat to self-integrity, creating a cognitive imbalance when one’s concept of self and expectation for success conflict with stereotypes that suggest one will perform badly. Wheeler, WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 10 Jarvis, and Petty (2001) found that individuals perform consistently with an outgroup stereotype only when the outgroup is temporarily incorporated into their own working self-concept. In this way, even if an individual does not always identify with a negatively stereotyped group, if they are manipulated in such a way to temporarily do so, they are left in a state of cognitive imbalance that underlies stereotype threat. It is also worth noting that positive self-identification is derived in part from membership in social groups (Tajfel, 1982) so group membership and identification could serve as an affirmation. However, when the group is negatively stereotyped it can also serve as a psychological threat. In summary, it is difficult to maintain one’s positive self-concept and negative group concept in a stereotype-relevant domain. Stereotype threat can have effects that people are either unable or unwilling to consciously report (Johns et al., 2008). In fact, that is one factor that differentiates stereotype threat from other social-evaluative threats that are detrimental to performance, such as test anxiety. Firstly, stereotype threat is unique from test anxiety because it is triggered by activating one’s membership in a negatively stereotyped group (Schmader et al., 2008). Stereotypethreatened individuals who are typically confident in their abilities, or who have a positive selfconcept, can find themselves in situations that are not explicitly evaluative and still perform badly. Notably, people may not know they are suffering from stereotype threat whereas it is fairly obvious when one is experiencing test anxiety. Stereotype threat is often cued subtly and can impair performance while leaving individuals unaware of their resulting feelings of anxiety (Johns et al., 2008). There are also situations in which, although stereotypes are present and relevant, they are not activated for individual students and therefore do not explain students’ underperformance. For example, if students have already de-identified with school and lost motivation to work hard WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 11 then a focus on eliminating stereotype threat may not make a difference (Steele, 1997). If a student does not identify with a school-domain at all then the self will not be threatened in the stereotype-relevant domain of school. There are also situations in which students simply do not have awareness of negative stereotypes about their group (Wasserberg, 2014). Thus, not every stereotype-relevant situation engenders stereotype threat in every student. In this way, stereotype activation may be a critical step in the process beginning with a stereotype-relevant situation and ending with underperformance that is left out of Schmader’s model. A model introduced later in this paper will address that gap. Stereotype Threat Affects Learning, Not Just Performance It is well established that stereotype threat is detrimental to performance in school settings (e.g, Nguyen & Ryan, 2008; Steele et al., 2002). However, Taylor and Walton (2011) explored how stereotype threat might impact learning itself. Measures of performance are not always the same as measures of learning, especially given today’s emphasis on high-stakes testing. Students who are subject to stereotype threat may not be able to convey all of their knowledge on exams, the traditional performance indicators, in such a way that demonstrates everything they have learned. Taylor and Walton reasoned that if stereotype threat impacts both learning and performance environments, it could cause cumulative performance deficits that could further explain the stark differences amongst different groups. They tested the effect of stereotype on learning directly by manipulating the presence or absence of stereotype threat in a learning environment and then assessing performance in both nonthreatening and then threatening environments. Black and White students studied rare words in either an evaluative, threat-inducing learning environment or in a non-evaluative learning environment. In the learning threat condition, the word-learning task was described as relevant to negative WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 12 intellectual stereotypes about African Americans. One to two weeks later, when students were tested, Black students who had studied in the evaluative environment defined about half as many words correctly as their peers who had studied in the nonthreatening performance setting. Whether or not White students studied in an evaluative environment made no difference on their performance since White students defined the same number of words in both settings. These results provided direct evidence that stereotype threat can undermine academic learning, leading the authors to claim that stereotype threat causes a form of “double jeopardy” (p.1057) because it both interferes with how well stereotyped students learn new material and also prevents stereotyped students from performing as well as they could on material they learned. One major implication of this study is that grades and test scores are not necessarily representative of stereotyped students’ ability. The study results are also a testament to the widespread and immense impact of stereotype threat. More specifically, stereotype threat prevents students from acquiring the intellectual building blocks they need to perform well in school. Lasting Impact of Stereotype Threat The Taylor and Walton study (2011) demonstrates how stereotype threat can have a longterm impact on academic success. When students fear confirming negative stereotypes about their intelligence, they may not learn as well and underperform in class despite high intellectual potential. After performing poorly in a class that provides foundational knowledge to be used in future classes and not acquiring the building blocks of knowledge they need from that course, students are less prepared for subsequent related courses. This could further undermine their confidence and feelings of self-efficacy, putting them at an increased disadvantage, and leading to successively worse performance. Thus, a maladaptive recursive process can be set in motion by stereotype threat. WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 13 Research emphasizes how poor performance and negative social and psychological processes may perpetuate over time in recursive cycles (e.g. Cohen et al., 2009). For example, with repeated exposure, stereotype threat can cause disidentification, whereby students detach their sense of self-worth from academic tasks and disengage from school (Steele, 1997). Identification with school and its subdomains is crucial for academic success. Additionally, students who expect rejection based on race may interpret any negative events in school as evidence of their lack of belonging, and belongingness is known to affect both motivation and performance (Connell, Halpern-Flesher, Clifford, Crichlow, & Usinger, 1995). Figure 2a illustrates how a negative recursive process stemming from stereotype threat can lead to underperformance over time and repeated instances of threat. Stereotype threat impairs learning which leads to decreased performance (Taylor & Walton, 2011). After performing badly, students will likely have lower confidence and feelings of belongingness in school, a construct that contributes to lower performance (Connell et al., 1995). When students continue to perform badly they are more likely to de-identify from school, resulting in less motivation to work hard (Steele, 1997), less engagement, and eventual long-term failure in school. Once students are caught in this negative recursive cycle in school it is exceedingly difficult to change their trajectories. We can, however, change students’ academic trajectories by employing interventions to successfully reduce the impact of stereotype threat. One strategy to combat stereotype threat is quite simple – tell the participants about stereotype threat. Johns, Schmader, and Marten (2005) conducted a study in which making participants aware of their susceptibility to stereotype threat was enough to combat it. In the threat condition, women were told they were taking a math exam that would examine gender differences in math ability. In the no-threat condition, women were WHY ARE SELF-AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS EFFECTIVE? 14 told they were taking an exam that tested individual differences on problem-solving exercises. In the third condition, like the first one, women were told they were taking a math exam that would examine gender differences in math ability; however, they were also told about stereotype threat and how it may make women feel more anxious while taking a math test and lead them to underperform as a result. Unsurprisingly, women underperformed men in the first condition and performed equally in the second condition. Women also performed equally to men in the third condition, though, showing that how individuals interpret their experience when under threat plays a critical role in performance. Perhaps making people aware of the threat they are experiencing allows them to overcome it or at least understand how the threat may impact them so that they can look past it. The researchers explained that knowing about stereotype threat provided a situational attribution, instead of an internal or personal one, thereby providing an external explanation for any arousal they felt. In the context of Schamder et al.’s model (2008), when people are told about stereotype threat, it affects their reappraisal of the situation in the negative emotional regulation cycle. Nevertheless, there is not yet enough research supporting this intervention strategy. Also, according to a meta-analysis conducted by Nguyen and Ryan (2008), stereotype threat led to a smaller decrease in performance for women than it did for minorities on difficult tests, suggesting that this method of informing people of stereotype threat may not have the same impact on minority populations other than women. The rest of the paper will focus on another important effort to reduce the impact of stereotype threat the aforementioned intervention strategy that uses self-affirmation exercises to reduce the impact of stereotype threat.