Breaking Stereotypes

Stereotype threat refers to being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Research shows that just being stereotyped negatively is enough to bring down performance. As Steele suggests, "a mind trying to defeat a stereotype leaves little mental capacity free for anything else we're doing"(p. 123). For instance, in the study conducted by Steele and Aronson,  African-American students performed worse than whites when students reported their race right before the test. However, when the race wasn't reported, no differences in GRE performance between white and black students were found. Most important, stereotype threat is most dramatic for those students who are most skilled and most interested in excelling at what they are being tested on.

Are there any ways in which stereotypes can be defeated? Steele reported the following findings of his research:
"By changing the way you give critical feedback, you can dramatically improve minority students’ motivation and receptiveness.
By improving a group’s critical mass in a setting, you can improve the members’ trust, comfort and performance in the setting.
By simply fostering intergroup conversations among students from different backgrounds, you can improve minority students’ comfort and grades in a setting.
By allowing students, especially minority students, to affirm their most valued sense of self, you can improve their grades, even for a long time. By helping students develop a narrative about the setting that explains their frustrations while projecting positive engagement and success in the setting, you can greatly improve their sense of belonging and achievement". (p. 216)

What are the ways you may apply this in Academic Mentoring? Here are a few of my ideas:

- Think of mistakes as opportunity for learning ( think growth mindset!).
- Develop trusting mentoring relationship: when interactions between people from different backgrounds have learning from each other as a goal, the trust is fostered. If you truly believe in the success of your mentee, students will feel that they are not judged by the bad stereotype about their group.
- Set high standards from the beginning: by demanding a lot, you at the same time make your students believe that they are capable of meeting those demands.
- Talk to your students about things outside of the course content: relations with family, friendships, experiences in classes, fraternities and sororities, and the like.
- Build the sense of self: e.g., in the beginning of semester, have your students write a brief paragraph on the value most important to them, explaining why they thought this value was an important one.
- Give examples from your life: let them know that you have also gone through the stress of college life.
- Have the positive outlook no matter how hard things get.
- If you work with more than one student, encourage your students to study together outside of your mentoring sessions. Think back to your readings about different groups of students studying differently and how that affected their performance. Asian students, who studied in groups, formal and informal, and made little distinction between their academic and social lives, did better than White and African-American students.

More thoughts on application of Steele's research in academic mentoring settings?

More on the notion of the "stereotype threat": Steele, C. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do.