The Effects of Awareness of the Achievement Gap on Black Youth and Parents

• In Event: 52.029 - Race, Rights, and Rigor: Identity, Learning, and Motivation Among African American Youth

Abstract

Race-related achievement gaps have received considerable media attention and as state and federal agencies have begun to publish such data widely, focus on racial achievement gaps has become more public. Public discourse on achievement gaps may reflect dedication to solution-finding on the part of school officials, but may have unintended consequences for Black youth and parents who are left alone to interpret the dialogue. In this set of studies, we extend stereotype threat theory (Steele & Aronson, 1997) to consider the ways in which Black parents’ and students’ awareness of the Black-White achievement gap relate to achievement motivation. We employ both pencil-and-paper assessments of parental views but we also include a small experiment to prime parents to think about the achievement gap.

Data are drawn from two studies of Black middle school students. One includes 67 students from 6th to 8th grades and one parent. The other study is of 191 Black 6th graders. Both samples come from ethnically and economically diverse districts (four total) in a Midwestern metropolitan area. The two samples used slightly different but overlapping pencil-and-paper measures of Achievement Gap Attributions where parents and students report the extent to which individual (ability, effort), family (access to resources, cultural discontinuity), and systemic (biased teachers, racial discrimination) can explain the lower performance of Black students relative to their White counterparts. Only the first group participated in the parent experiment. Half of these parents read a story highlighting race differences in achievement. The others read a similar story with no mention of race. After completing a difficult math puzzle, parents and children reported their the child’s affect (negative and positive), the parent’s affect, and parents’ autonomy promotion (e.g., helping the child when needed and not imposing unsolicited help), and intrusive involvement (i.e., parent helped without being asked). Parents and children also reported how often they had heard about the achievement gap in the media, from friends, and from the school.
Results of both studies showed that students were most likely to endorsee individual attributions (primarily effort and motivation) and least likely to endorse systemic sources. Parents endorsed individual sources least and equally blamed family and systemic sources. Students’ and parents’ systemic attributions were negatively associated with motivational outcomes (classroom engagement, academic preparation) in both studies. One group showed that family attributions were positively associated with motivation.
Results of the experiment showed parents primed to think about the achievement gap reported more negative affect and intrusive behavior than the no-prime group. Children in the prime group reported more support from their parents as well. We are coding the videos so that we can also provide observational assessments of parent-child interactions.
Taken together, these results suggest that the ways in which Black parents and students view race-related achievement gaps has implications for student motivation and parent engagement. The results emphasize the importance of schools shaping the messaging that accompanies discussions of the achievement gap and may inform interventions that might help students form healthy attributions.

Author

• Stephanie J. Rowley, University of Michigan