A classroom exercise that addressed minority students' social concerns about "belonging" in college dramatically improved their academic performance, according to a University of Colorado at 麻豆影院 professor.
The written exercise, or intervention, that expressed to minority students the notion that most college freshmen wonder about their social relationships in school, and that such concerns subside with time, was found to have a significant impact in improving their grades, according to Associate Professor Geoffrey Cohen of CU-麻豆影院's psychology department.
"In particular, the intervention benefited the performance of African-American students," Cohen said. "It conveyed to the students that questions of belonging aren't unique to them or members of their racial group."
Cohen co-authored a paper on the topic with lead author Gregory Walton of the University of Waterloo in Canada. They conducted the study with various groups totaling 336 students at a college in the northeastern United States and their results were published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The first part of the study looked at whether there is a connection between college students' feeling of "social belonging" and their motivation in school. To determine this, one group of African-American and nonminority students was asked to list two friends who were likely to fit in well in an academic field, while a second group was asked the same question but asked to list eight friends instead of two.
The exercise had no impact on students asked to list two friends, and both African-American and nonminority students had difficulty naming eight friends. But only African-Americans interpreted their difficulty in naming eight friends as evidence that they also wouldn't fit in and belong in the field, according to Cohen.
"We found a negative impact from a subtle social threat, suggesting that concerns about social belonging were present in this group," Cohen said. "So if you're negatively stereotyped, it raises the question of belonging more than if you're not."
The researchers then set out to design a written exercise, or intervention, that would address this negative interpretation by African-American students. The second part of the study looked at students' academic achievement after completing the exercise on the notion that most college freshmen wonder about their social relationships in school, and that such concerns subside with time.
In the short term, African-American students who did the exercise were more likely to request help from their professors and spent more time studying than students who didn't do the exercise, according to daily records they were asked to keep. They also were less likely to go from having a bad day in school to believing they didn't belong in school.
The long-term results showed the African-American students who participated in the intervention were doing better academically than the students in the control group.
The racial achievement gap for African-American students in the intervention group compared to a control group of students was narrowed by nearly 90 percent, Cohen said. The average participant's grade-point average went up by about three-tenths of a grade point.
"An important implication of this study is that purely psychological interventions, ones that change the way people interpret their social environment, can have significant effects on student achievement under the right conditions," Cohen said.
Most research on student achievement focuses on students' perceptions of themselves rather than on their perceptions of their social relationships, he said.
"In our study, we wanted to see whether an individual's perception of their social environment and the quality of their relationships was a potential factor in the race gap in academic performance," Cohen said. "The psychological environment is an underappreciated aspect of students' academic performance, especially that part of the psychological environment linked to individuals' group identity and how they think other people view them."
However, Cohen cautioned against generalizing the results, since their study involved only one small group of students at a single school. He and Walton plan to continue their research as a long-term project and conduct further experiments in different types of settings.