School Composition and Self-Affirmation Treatment Effect Heterogeneity

• In Event: Scaling Up a Social-Psychological Intervention to Combat Stereotype Threat and Narrow Achievement Gaps

Abstract

Objectives

How one perceives the environment is a critical component affecting social-psychological processes related to stereotype threat (Murphy & Taylor, 2011; Cohen & Garcia, 2008). While the role of situational cues in the environment has been theorized and tested extensively in lab-based studies, more recent work has examined how specific compositional or contextual features of the environment affect social identity threat processes, such as vigilance and feelings of belonging (Murphy, Steele, & Gross, 2007). This paper explores how the overall impacts vary across the unique contexts of the 11 distinct sites.

Perspectives

Two important contextual features of schools are the presence of one’s racial group in the student body and the relative academic performance of one’s race/ethnic group relative to the majority. For instance, racial minority students may perceive the school environment as less threatening when a larger proportion of the student body shares their racial identification.

Data Sources

This analysis includes the 910 consented 7th grade students with valid outcome and pretest information for grade point average (GPA) and Wisconsin Knowledge Concepts Examination (WKCE) state reading and math scores. We use administrative data for the population of 7th graders in each of the 11 schools to characterize the presence and relative academic performance of Black and Hispanic students. Additional student-level controls for the sample include gender, limited English proficiency, special education status, and free lunch eligibility.

Methods

Our theory predicts differential effects of self-affirmation in different types of schools, with stronger benefits in schools with low representations of Black and Hispanic students and schools with large existing Black-White and Hispanic-White achievement gaps. Using measures of the student body, we identified two groups: 7 schools with small minority populations and large achievement gaps (where affirmation benefits are expected to be highest) and 4 schools with greater numbers of minority students and small achievement gaps. We then estimate separate treatment effects on GPA and WKCE scores for each racial group within each of the two context categories, applying the same modeling strategy as presented in our main effects analysis (paper #2).

Results

Consistent with our hypothesis, affirmation effects for Black and Hispanic students tend to be larger in the 7 schools identified as having small minority populations and large achievement gaps, at least for standardized mathematics achievement and GPA.

Our estimated affirmation effects for Black and Hispanic students on cumulative GPA revealed slight positive impacts for both groups, overall. But these overall effects mask more substantial benefits of about 0.15 standard deviations in school contexts where stereotype threat may be more pervasive and negligible or negative effects for both race/ethnic groups in the contexts where we expect weakest effects.

Implications

The effects of the self-affirmation writing interventions, while promising, vary across school contexts. This may explain mixed findings in recent implementations of affirmation. Going forward, our results suggest that these social-psychological interventions have targeted—rather than universal—policy value, with the strongest potential to help reduce racial achievement gaps where the need is greatest.

Authors

• Paul Hanselman, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Sarah Bruch, University of Iowa

• Adam Gamoran, William T. Grant Foundation