|
 “We don't think the discrimination and bias, by itself, had this
effect,” said lead study author David Yeager, a psychology
researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and co-chair of the
Mindset Scholars Network at Stanford University in California.
“Instead, we think these experiences made students disengage from
the system,” Yeager added by email. “Once you're disengaged, you do
worse, you get lower grades, you're more likely to get in trouble,
and so on, and once kids have low grades or high absences, they're
just less likely to go on and get higher SAT scores and eventually
make it to college.”
In a time of increased concern about how minorities are treated by
police, teachers and other authorities, it is critical to examine
whether students of color have experiences in school that lead to
mistrust of authorities and what the long-term implications are for
young people, Yeager and colleagues write in the journal Child
Development.
Minority youth perceived and experienced more biased treatment and
lost more trust over the middle school years than their white peers,
researchers found. Minority students' growing lack of trust in turn
predicted whether they acted out in school and whether they made it
to college years later.
The analysis included 277 black and white students at one school in
the northeast U.S. and a second group of 206 white and Latino
students from Colorado. The first group was followed though college
entry, but the second group was not.
Researchers assessed trust by asking the students to complete
surveys that featured questions like "I am treated fairly by
teachers and other adults at my school" and "If a black or white
student is alone in the hallway during class time, which one would a
teacher ask for a hall pass?"
With the first group, black students reported more bias in school
discipline decisions, and school records in fact showed that only
minorities were disciplined for “defiance” and “disobedience.”
As middle school progressed, black students became more aware of
this bias and less trustful of school authorities, the study found.
Even students who never had discipline issues before became more
likely to experience these problems once they lost trust in teachers
and other school authorities.
[to top of second column] |
Researchers found a similar pattern among the Latino and white
students in the second group, with distrust increasing for students
of color as middle school progressed.
Within the first group of kids, however, researchers tested a pilot
project that randomly selected 88 seventh grade social studies
students to be singled out for special encouragement. These kids got
a hand-written note on an essay encouraging them to meet a higher
standard and implying the teacher believed they had the ability to
do this.
This note made no difference for white students. But black students
who received the note had fewer disciplinary incidents and were more
likely to be enrolled in college six years later.
While the study is small, and a one-time note for a few kids doesn’t
prove what interventions can improve college attendance among
students of color, the findings suggest it’s possible to create an
environment of trust even for students who contend with
discrimination, the authors conclude.
“It is highly likely that students of color experience injustice
based on race in the community as well as in school,” said Dr.
Caroline Kistin, a pediatrics researcher at Boston University School
of Medicine who wasn’t involved in the study.
“In some ways, this makes the intervention in school even more
important,” Kistin added by email. “It might help to buffer the
discrimination that students face elsewhere.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2loX5jo Child Development, online February 8,
2017
[© 2017 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2017 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
