Monitor on Psychology - September 2011 - (Page 39)

What was going on? Cohen hypothesizes that the exercise started a self-reinforcing loop. It strengthened students psychologically at a crucial time, right at the beginning of the school year. By reminding them of something personal that mattered to them, it reduced their stress level and pushed down the distracting worries, brought on by stereotype threat, that they might not measure up. Because of that, they were able to do better on one crucial first exam or homework assignment. Doing well early on boosted their resilience to stereotypes even more, leading to another successful test — and, perhaps, permanently changing their academic trajectory. Researchers don’t yet know the precise cognitive mechanisms at work in the study, says cognitive psychologist Akira Miyake, PhD, of the University of Colorado–Boulder, who has worked with Cohen on the research. But he hypothesizes that pushing down extraneous worries could increase the amount of working memory that students have available to concentrate on schoolwork. Since Cohen’s first studies, he and other researchers have tested the model in other populations, including among female physics students. Women in science face some of the same stereotypes, and achievement gaps, that blacks and Latinos face in the rest of academia. In 2008, women earned only 20 percent of the bachelor’s degrees and 18 percent of the doctorates awarded in physics, according to the American Physical Society, even though they earned nearly 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees overall. Miyake and psychologist Tiffany Ito, PhD, along with Cohen, had about 400 students in an introductory physics class at the University of Colorado–Boulder complete a personal-value writing exercise similar to the one used in the Connecticut middle school study. The college physics students did the exercise twice, once during the first week of the semester and once right before the first exam. In a study published in Science in 2010 (Vol. 330, No. 6008), the researchers found that women who did the self-affirmation exercise did significantly better in the class: Among the control group, about 60 percent of the women earned C’s and less than 30 percent earned B’s. In the self-affirmation group, as many women earned B’s as earned C’s. The exercise didn’t affect men’s grades in the class. Dubson, the physics professor who taught the class and who was initially skeptical about the intervention, was blown away by the results. “Holy mackerel, most of our curriculum is based on the theory that the most important thing in learning is ‘time on task,’ because learning is messy and hard,” he says. “I can’t think of anything else that you could do in 30 minutes that would have a measurable effect on exam scores.” Other brief interventions, based on related psychological concepts, have also shown promise for reducing achievement gaps. For example, many students face a tough transition to septeMber 2011 • Monitor on psychology college, but minority students have an added complication: stereotypes that undermine their sense that they belong on campus. A black student struggling to adapt during his first year of college might subconsciously feel that his social or academic troubles were due to race rather than normal freshman jitters. In one recent study, Stanford psychology professor Gregory Walton, PhD, with Cohen, found that boosting a sense of belonging among black college freshmen could improve the students’ grades all the way through their senior year. In the study, published in March in Science (Vol. 331, No. 6,023), Walton and Cohen asked 90 black and white college freshmen to read vignettes, purportedly written by older students, describing how school was difficult at first but how eventually they found their social and academic niche. Then the participants had to write essays about what they had just read. A control group read vignettes unrelated to social belonging. The goal was to change students’ attitudes about their sense of fitting in, and to subtly let them know that their “fish-outof-water” worries were common to all students, and not a sign that they weren’t meant for college. It worked. Over the next three years, the black students in the treatment group earned GPAs nearly one-third of a point higher, on average, than those in the control group — roughly halving the black-white achievement gap. Scaling up In science, the proof is in the replication. So right now, Cohen, Miyake and the other psychologists are again working with physics professor Michael Dubson to replicate their “women in college physics” study. During the original study, the personal-value writing exercise went smoothly. But this time, a student presented Dubson with a problem. After the first writing exercise, the student came up to Dubson and said, “Hey, I know what you’re doing — I’ve read about this research.” Dubson asked her not to tell her classmates about the purpose of the writing exercise, and no other student mentioned knowing anything about the research. But the glitch illustrates a challenge for psychologists: If these interventions became more common, and students — particularly older, savvier students — started to recognize them, would they still work? Some evidence suggests they wouldn’t, at least not as well. In one study, published in 2009 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 97, No. 5), Cohen and University of California–Santa Barbara, psychologist David Sherman, PhD, found that a self-affirmation exercise didn’t work as well when they told the participants that the point of the exercise was to boost self-worth. That might be because telling them the purpose of the exercise caused them to see it as simply a means to an end, the researchers suggest, which undermined its selfaffirming punch. The question of whether students could “know too much” 39

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Monitor on Psychology - September 2011

Monitor on Psychology - September 2011
Letters
President’s Column
Contents
From the CEO
Supreme Court hears psychologists on prison and video game cases
Antipsychotics are overprescribed in nursing homes
New MCAT likely to recognize the mind-body connection
A $2 million boost for military and families
In Brief
GOVERNMENT RELATIONS UPDATE
On Your Behalf
Judicial Notebook
Random Sample
TIME CAPSULE
QUESTIONNAIRE
Speaking of Education
SCIENCE WATCH
An uncertain future for American workers
Advocating for psychotherapy
PRACTICE PROFILE
ETHICALLY SPEAKING
Seared in our memories
Helping kids cope in an uncertain world
APA and Nickelodeon team up
Muslims in America, post 9/11
Bin Laden’s death
‘They expect us to be there’
Answering the call of public policy
Candidates answer final questions
APA News
Division Spotlight
New leaders
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATION
Disaster relief training
Honoring teaching excellence
Personalities

Monitor on Psychology - September 2011