Stereotype Threat And Gender Threat On Learning

Knowledge of negative stereotypes can influence people’s performance. Stereotype threat creates extra performance pressure through apprehensiveness about conforming to negative stereotypes (Woolfolk &

Stereotype threat is when a person who belongs to a group that has previously been negatively stereotyped unintentionally lets their self- doubt affect their performance, thereby positively confirming the negative stereotype about that said group. An example of this would be how white males who are taking a math test perform worse when they believe they are competing against Asian males taking the same test. Test validity refers to the ability in which a test accurately measures what it is proposing to measure. For example, if a teacher tells her class they are going to be tested on addition, problems like 5+5= and 10+10= would yield valid test results. However, if the questions were 5x5= and 10x10=, the results of the test would hold no validity,

How have my own experiences conforming to stereotypes equipped me to deal with stereotype threats that may be present in my sessions with students as a Speaking Fellow? My past is inundated with the roles I have adopted. As the single female in a combat unit in the military this stereotype manifested as I forfeited my femininity to become one of the boys. I had no desire to be seen as a woman who needed to be coddled (as the men I served with presumed) so I assumed the role of tomboy, eating as they, sporting baggy, unfitted pants to cover my womanly curves, and sacrificing my use of silverware in my efforts to be “just one of the guys.” As I matriculated to Barnard, my identity changed again. Barnard’s slogan is “bold, beautiful,

To stress the prevalence of the effects of stereotypes, Steele repeated his first experiment with white men and Asian men as the subjects. As the dominant group, white people are often unaffected by the stereotype, but in this particular experiment they underperformed greatly. Stereotypes even exist within racial groups. In one experiment, Steele had older people and younger people try to memorize 30 words for two minutes. Afterwards, they would try to write down as many words as they can. The group of older people who read an article confirming that age impairs memory wrote down significantly fewer words than the group of older people that did not receive the treatment. This is also an example of ageism (Henslin, 2017). A common motif in Steele’s experiments is a reminder of the stereotype, referred to as a cue. The experiments demonstrate that the smallest hint of a stereotype is enough of a cue to cause underperformance. In an experiment with girls and boys ages five to seven, the only difference between the treatment and control group was coloring a picture of a doll.

O’Brien, L.T., & Crandall, C.S. (2003) Stereotype threat and arousal: effects on women’s math performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 782-789.

Many theories have been suggested to try to explain the low performance of Hispanic and African American students compared to their white peers. Stereotype threat theory proposes that the possibility of being judged in terms of a negative stereotype in a particular domain negatively affects one’s performance. African American students are even more vulnerable to this social-psychological threat that occurs when students anticipate the possibility of fulfilling a negative stereotype. Some of the effects of stereotype threat include anxiety, low academic standards and low test scores. (Steele,

Results from numerous studies suggest that African Americans are likely to experience stereotype threat related to performance in Caucasian dominated tasks. Steele & Aronson (1995) conducted a study that examined the effects of stereotype threat of African Americans on standardized tests. The participants included African American and Caucasian Stanford University students who completed a modified version of the verbal GRE examination (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Participants were randomized into two testing groups, the diagnostic condition, which tested intellectual ability and exposure to stereotype threat, and the non-diagnostic condition, which involved laboratory problem solving tasks unrelated to stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995).

Everyone, including gifted individuals, face stereotype threats at some point in their lifetime. This threat controls their production and the results in the classroom and in the real world. The expectations become the threat that make individuals, usually minorities, susceptible to a decline in achievement (Schmader, 14-15). Without the intervention of positive influences to encourage and support them, people will begin to feel self-conscious of themselves and perform worse than expected (Schmader, 14). Psychologists performed a study attempting to correct the assumptions and consequences of stereotype threat. After the teachers informed all of the students about the stereotype threat that targeted females, they comforted the students and

The idea of not performing adequately on a task is something that many people can relate too. This uncomfortable feeling can be experienced throughout many different situations. Previous research suggests that stereotypes on how people are perceived to act or perform can hinder their thought processes and impact their overall performance. This is referred to as stereotype threat. Individuals undergo stereotype threat when they feel pressure to conform to the stereotype that is present. Stereotype Threat is not limited to any category or situation, but has been found to be more prominent in certain areas. This paper will focus on stereotype threat effects in math performance between genders, race/ethnicity and age.

This paper will explore the world of stereotypes that are put on certain races or groups known as Stereotype threat and identity contingencies. The author shows numerous experiments on a broad spectrum from testing ability and physical activities when stereotype threats are and aren’t present and how that affects people's ability to perform. It will bring to light the way people feel when identity contingencies are present in a society, along with the consequences. Stopping the issue completely is going to be difficult, but there are ways to reduce the risk and improve the situation. Already, in today’s society improvements can be seen compared to when the issues were first recognized.

When social psychologist Claude Steele began writing about the problem of stereotype threats in the 1990s, many other researchers began to do the same thing. Steele offered that when members of certain groups can be stereotyped in a negative way, they will be seen “through the lens of diminishing stereotypes and low expectations” (1999, p.44). According to Kassin, Fein, and Markus, stereotype threat is defined as “The experience of concern about being evaluated based on negative stereotypes about one’s group.” Steele concluded that stereotype threat can be achieved in two ways: reactions to “threat in the

Is it possible that the way society sees a group can influence how that group performs on tests of intelligence? According to the Stereotype Threat Theory, it can. Stereotype Threat Theory “refers to the conscious or unconscious belief that one belongs to a group stereotypically known for specific performance deficits. The hypothesis is that these beliefs lead to suboptimal performance on tasks specific to the stereotype” (Stoet 94). Stereotype threat leads to a large gap between privileged, un-stereotyped groups and affected groups in society with regards to jobs, education, and social interactions. This gap comes from stereotyped groups feeling they need to act in the way society tells them to, creating societal “chains” on these groups, essentially an unstated law telling them what they can and cannot do. This is because stereotype threat causes groups to identify with what society provides their status to be Experiments show commonly stereotyped groups perform worse on intellectual tests they are told their group generally does bad on. Therefore, commonly stereotyped groups suffer from the stereotype threat on intellectual tests.

There have been many studies on stereotype threat and self-esteem and their negative effects on task performance. These studies have focused primarily on minorities such as women, blacks, Latinos and Asians and have found that stereotype threat and self-esteem have influenced negatively in task performance. Steele (1997) investigated how self-esteem and stereotype threat affects task performance and has found that most of task failures have to do with the individual social environment. For instance, a study was conducted in which black students completed a difficult task with either a black or white experimenter. The task was described as intelligent test (Steele & Aronson, 1995). When the experimenter was white, the student performed more

Braden seated in the corner of the classroom most of the class time. During one activity he got up of his seat and joined two 6th graders boys to answer questions on a race using their iPads. His team won the race, and then he went back to his seat and stayed there while the rest of the students were moving around during the presentations and activities.

The first effect of stereotyping is a phenomenon known as “stereotype threat” that occurs in a situation where a person is in fear of unintentionally confirming a negative stereotype. Several studies have been conducted to discover the effects of stereotype threats. For example, I discovered that Toni Schmader, an assistant professor of the UA psychology department, and Michael Johns, a UA graduate (ethos), conducted studies that showed, “college women score lower on tests of mathematical ability, and Hispanic students might score lower on tests of intelligence, not because they have less ability, but because reminders of negative stereotypes temporarily decrease their ‘working memory capacity’ (UA News Services, “Exploring the Negative Consequences of Stereotyping”, UANews.Arizona.edu).” This demonstrates that the students did not do worse on the test due to their lack of skills, but rather due to negative stereotypes. In a similar study by professors Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, African American and White college students took the same intelligence test under two conditions. In the stereotype threat condition the students were told the test would evaluate their intelligence, and in the