Scaling Up a Self-Affirmation Intervention in Saint Paul

• In Event: Scaling Up Social Psychological Interventions to Address Achievement Gaps in Education

Abstract

From a field-based trial in middle-school classrooms, Cohen et al. (2006; 2009) reported that a 15-minute self-affirmation writing task aimed at affirming students’ personal values reduced the Black–White grade-point-average (GPA) gap by as much as 40%. The affirmation exercises are intended to buffer students from “stereotype threat”, which impedes performance of minority students in multiple content areas and girls and women in science and mathematics (Steele & Aronson, 1995).

If the results from this relatively simple intervention can be replicated and better understood, it could hold tremendous potential for closing achievement gaps across the country. In this large-scale replication across three Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS) middle schools, we tested whether the Cohen (2006) writing exercise could close achievement gaps among 1,628 7th and 8th on state math and reading tests.

By engaging in self-affirmation of an important value, the intervention emphasizes positive traits that affirm students’ overall self-worth. This helps buffer threatened students from stereotypes and they experience fewer of the deleterious physiological and psychological effects caused by the threat and associated with poor academic performance.

We assigned at random half of the 1,628 students to receive a self-affirming exercise in which they selected from a list two or three values important to them, such as being a good athlete or being a good friend. The students were then asked to write a brief expressive essay about the values selected. Control students received a similar exercise, but were asked to identify two or three values from the list that were not important to them, and then write about why the values may be important to someone else. We tested whether the writing exercise could close achievement gaps on the spring 2011 7th and 8th grade Minnesota state reading and math assessments, the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment—Series II (MCA-II) tests.

Implementation analyses indicated 1318 (81%) of all 7th and 8th grade students at the three middle schools completed at least some of the writing exercise. “Intention-to-treat” analyses of students assigned the exercise revealed no treatment impacts for ethnic minority students but a significant positive impact for girls of approximately one-tenth of a standard deviation on mathematics test scores. On average, girls who completed the control exercise underperformed boys with similar demographic and academic backgrounds, and girls who completed the affirmation writing exercise performed as well as boys on the mathematics achievement test.

We did not replicate the positive impacts for African-American students found by Cohen et al. (2006), but did find that the affirmation positively impacted girls’ math test scores. Girls perform as well as or better than boys on homework assignments and course grades in math and science classes (College Board, 2006; Shettle et al., 2007), but boys tend to outscore girls in high-pressure situations, such as standardized tests with time limits (Steele, 1997). Our findings suggest that the affirmation writing exercises helped girls more reliably demonstrate their true abilities on a high-stakes, standardized test of mathematics.

Authors

• Geoffrey D. Borman, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Jeffrey A. Grigg, Johns Hopkins University

• Dominique Bradley, University of Wisconsin - Madison