Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers
By SAM DILLON
Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance.
Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.
The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.
“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”
The study has not yet undergone peer review, and two academics who read it on Thursday said they would be interested to see if other researchers would be able to replicate its results.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Newsvine
Furl
Google
Yahoo
Let's wait a while, shall we?
The article alludes to studies of what Claude Steele (the "good" Steele brother) has called stereotype threat. It would surely be interesting if this turned out to be like flipping a switch, but let's see if any gains in performance last a few years before getting all excited. Let's let the study get through peer review fergoshsake. This article may be a trial balloon, first in a series to see if we can end affirmative action by Obama's mere presence on the scene. (Just kidding... oh, maybe I'm not...)
Actually, it seems there's a
Actually, it seems there's a change mere belief (rather than his mere presence) could have such an impact.
When experimenters told white golfers that the quality of their game would reflect "natural athletic ability" instead of their strategic intellectual prowess, their performance was much worse than that of black players. White male students' performance was similarly depressed when they took a math test in which Asian-Americans were said to do better.
and
Affirmation of Worth Boosts Scores of Black Children
African-American schoolchildren who completed a brief writing assignment designed to reaffirm their sense of self-worth received higher grades at the end of the semester than those given a control intervention, a new study finds. These better-performing children closed the grade gap with their white peers by 40 percent, apparently because the assignment interrupted the harmful effects of declining performance early in the semester.
Researchers have invoked a concept called stereotype threat to help explain why black students in the U.S. consistently perform worse in school than their white counterparts. In this view, members of a minority experience anxiety at the prospect of confirming negative stereotypes about their group, such as low intelligence. This anxiety impedes their performance in tasks that reflect on the stereotype, creating a downward spiral in which anxiety and poor performance feed on one another. In past experiments college students have been told that a test they are about to take is insensitive to race or gender, and such interventions can reduce group differences in test scores. "No one had looked at whether these kinds of processes could be manipulated in the real world and have long-term consequences," says social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Cohen and his colleagues studied a group of about 250 seventh graders, some black and some white, attending a suburban middle school in the Northeast. The children were randomly chosen to receive a 15-minute writing assignment that asked them to indicate their most important value and why it mattered to them, as a way to affirm their sense of integrity or worth. The remaining students wrote about their least important value and why it might matter to others.
Despite the intervention's brevity, the black children who received the affirmative assignment scored one fourth to one third of a grade point higher in that course than the black control group at the end of the term, and the difference showed up in other classes, too. In contrast, the assignment showed no effect on white students. "What's remarkable about this are the long-term effects on grades. It's just an eye-opener that a 15-minute intervention can have this effect," says Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia, who was not involved in the study. Cohen agrees: "it's tapping at something that runs really deep in these kids." The intervention is described in the September 1 Science. Whether it would work in other school environments remains to be seen.
The biggest mistake here:
The biggest mistake here: the fact that finding is "statistically nonsignificant" doesn't tell you much at all. If your sample is small, you'll often fail to get statistical significance even if the true gap is large. Failure to reject the null hypothesis doesn't prove it, especially in a study with a small sample size. Also, it's my understanding that releasing the results of a study prior to peer review is generally regarded as a red flag.
1. Note that they give the scores pre-Obama, but not post-Obama. So there was still a gap, but perhaps only at a 90% significance level rather than a 95% level.
2. Sample size of students is tiny, as you noted.
3. The number of questions is very small.
4. Self-selection effects (it's an internet study, not a representative sample).
5. Different times of year may catch students in or out of school, different people who may have heard about the study (including from the experimenters, who may have sent flyers or emails to different places), etc.
The real test is whether the CHANGE in the gap is statistically significant.