Invoking High Standards and Assurance Increases African-American Students’ Motivation and Achievement

• In Event: “Wise” Educational Interventions: How Understanding Stereotyped Students’ Subjective Construals Can Improve Motivation and Performance

Abstract

Critical teachers and mentors face a dilemma. On the one hand, if they provide harsh criticism of the sort that students need to improve, then they run the risk of leading students to think teachers are unfair or biased, or that students like them are disliked. This risk is especially great for negatively-stereotyped racial minority students, who may have more reason to wonder if the educational system at large is fair for them. On the other hand, if teachers lower the standards for racial minority students and give unearned high grades--or simply do not provide criticism on a students’ work at all--then they limit students’ opportunities for learning. They are also, in that case, objectively biased, reinforcing students’ hunches. Typically, teachers resolve this dilemma by buffering their critical feedback with a compliment: they first say that they like the student, or that the work is good overall, and then outline suggested revisions and changes. Although intuitively appealing, this “positive buffer” approach has serious limitations, specifically for racial minority students, because it does not address whether the system as a whole is fair for students like them. In past research (Cohen, Steele, & Ross, 1999), while European-American students’ motivation to improve seemed to benefit from a positive buffer, for African-American students the positive buffer had no effect on motivation or the belief that the teacher is biased. Instead, it was only when a teacher specifically invoked a higher standard plus a personal assurance that a student could meet a higher standard that African-American students’ perceptions of bias and motivation to improve were increased. This is because invoking high standards and personal assurance specifically addresses the worry that the school system is designed to prevent students like them from succeeding: instead, school is seen as place where teachers go the extra mile to help you succeed.

The present study extended past research by examining the effects of high standards and assurance invocations on actual behavior in middle school and high school classrooms. Two double-blind field experiments randomly assigned half of students to receive a note from a teacher communicating that criticism on a first draft essay came from high standards and assurance. In Study 1, 20% of African-American students in the control condition revised their essays, compared to 74% in the high standards plus assurance condition. In Study 2, invoking high standards and assurance led to a 1.08 standard deviation increase in the quality of African-American students’ revised essays. In Study 3, a brief (20-minute) online intervention taught students attending an urban New York City public high school to construe criticism from teachers as arising from high standards and assurance. At the end of the semester, the gap in English, Math, Social Studies and Science grades between African-American and European-American students in the treatment group was reduced by 40% compared to the control group. Implications for social-cognitive theories of motivation and for interventions to reduce racial inequalities are discussed.

Author

• David Scott Yeager, Stanford University