Reframing Tests as Non-Evaluative Erased Racial Performance Gaps in Lab Studies
Greg Walton · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · Aug 20, 2019 · at 3:37
Stanford psychologist Greg Walton discusses Claude Steele's foundational social psychology experiments on stereotype threat and testing performance.
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“It was work showing that if you just change the way that a test was represented in the laboratory, you brought people in, undergraduates in, in the original studies, and you gave them a difficult GRE verbal test, you found that African-American students did less well than white students. And yet, if you took this very same task and you said, oh, we're a bunch of cognitive psychologists and we're just interested in how people solve puzzles, this is not, Evaluative of your abilities. Suddenly, that inequality went away. African American students did a whole lot better, just as well as white students with the same SAT scores, in some cases, even slightly better.”
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