Meeting Abstract
Stereotype threat can be defined as distress associated with the prospect of confirming a negative stereotype about a group to which one belongs. Stereotype threat is associated with lower performance in science courses in women, underrepresented minority (URM) groups and first-generation college students. At UW Parkside, 53% of students are first generation and 30% are from URM groups. Our population is potentially at risk for stereotype threat in large science courses like introductory biology. I performed a controlled experiment implementing a one-time, brief values-affirmation writing intervention in the first week of a large introductory biology course. Despite its simplicity, this values-affirmation writing exercise has been shown to positively affect performance in first-generation and underrepresented minority groups. In this study, students who had the opportunity to affirm their values in writing in the first week of classes showed a 7% better performance on their average exam scores for the semester. In contrast to previous work all students benefitted, on average, from participating in the values affirmation compared to control group. This includes males and females, continuing and first-generation students, URM students and non-URM students. Although an achievement gap between URM and non-URM students persists, URM students participating in the intervention had an 8.5% increase in exam performance overall versus those in the control group. In contrast, there was no significant gap between first generation and continuing-generation students. This suggests that stereotype threat can work differently at different college environments, and more work needs to be done to explore this issue on different types of campuses.
