Self-Affirmation Exercises Found To Boost Some Achievement

July 30, 2014

Self-affirmation writing exercises improved the achievement, especially in mathematics, of students who may suffer from stereotype threat.

The academic achievement of African American and Hispanic students continues to trail that of their White peers. The concept of “stereotype threat” is one of many contributors to explaining these achievement gaps and offers an avenue to intervene and narrow them.

UW–Madison education professor Geoffrey Borman says this phenomenon undermines the performance of negatively stereotyped persons, such as African Americans and Hispanics in all academic subjects, or women in mathematics. Students who are aware that they belong to a group perceived to perform poorly academically often fear behaving in a way that fits the negative cultural image associated with a group stereotype.

This fear is largely unconscious, but it elicits anxiety and other counterproductive responses that can interfere with students’ thinking and performance on standardized tests.

Underperformance due to stereotype threat may lead students to alter their career aspirations. It may challenge their sense of belonging in school. It may lead them to “protectively dis-identify” from academics. 
Self-affirmation exercises have been found to help students productively cope with stereotype threat by bolstering other dimensions of their self-worth. Students can compensate in one area—values—for a deficit in another—group identity—and thereby maintain a positive overall sense of themselves.

Expressive writing, in which students write about things that are important to them, is the most commonly used approach to engage in values affirmation, especially among large groups of students.

How might a series of writing exercises lead to substantial changes in academic performance? Borman and colleagues found that writing helps students gain relatively “quick wins.” As these accumulate in a recursive process, like a chain reaction, the gains are carried forward.

Borman’s evaluation was the first districtwide study of a values-affirmation writing intervention. He conducted the study in Wisconsin, where the academic achievement gaps between Whites and Blacks, and Whites and Hispanics, are among the largest in the United States, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. He conducted the study in all the middle schools in one school district, making it the most expansive test of such an intervention among secondary students to date. The study tracked students’ GPA and examined the potential impacts of self-affirmation on standardized achievement tests administered at the beginning and end of the school year.

The analysis contrasted two groups of students: those who are potentially subject to stereotype threat (the affirmation group) and those who are not (the comparison group). The students completed four writing exercises over the course of one school year.

The first two exercises asked students in the affirmation group to choose, from a list, two or three items that were most important to them. The comparison students were offered an identical list, but they were asked to identify the two or three items they considered leastimportant, and to write about how they might be important to someone else. Both exercises included follow-up questions to reinforce student reflection.

Students in the affirmation condition then were asked to describe something important to them, while students in the comparison condition were asked to describe what they did that day before school.

The fourth exercise was administered later on in the school year and tailored to the affirmation student based on his or her choices in the first and second exercises. It asked the student to reflect on an item chosen earlier and describe how it is important to him or her. Students in the comparison condition wrote an expository essay describing what they do after the school day ends.

Shortly after the second writing exercise, students took the state reading and mathematics tests, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE). Borman found no evidence of an impact of the self-affirmation exercise on students’ reading test scores. The mathematics outcome, however, differed: Students identified as potentially subject to stereotype threat and assigned to the affirmation condition scored higher in the mathematics section of the WKCE than students assigned to the comparison condition.

The researchers then evaluated the potential impacts of self-affirmation for students who may be vulnerable to stereotype threat on the spring Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test. As with the fall WKCE reading test, there was no evidence of an impact on reading. However, the self-affirmation writing exercises positively influenced the scores of stereotype-threat-vulnerable students in writing and grammar, or language usage. There also was strong evidence of a treatment impact on spring MAP scores in mathematics, with students assigned to the self-affirmation condition scoring higher than the condition group.

Borman cautions that self-affirmation writing does not plausibly develop mathematics ability, but there are reasons why self-affirmation might impact math achievement and not reading. First, taking a mathematics test is perhaps more stressful for students. Stress compounds the self-monitoring and other harmful processes that stereotype threat induces in vulnerable students. If mathematics tests are more threatening than reading tests for seventh grade students, then self-affirmation is more likely to help students demonstrate their abilities in mathematics than in reading.

Second, other research provides evidence that mathematics performance is more responsive to school inputs than reading. That’s perhaps because students have alternative venues for learning to read (e.g., the family).

Borman says the overall impacts of the self-affirmation exercise represent about a 28% improvement over the annual achievement gain otherwise expected for seventh graders.

If the results from this intervention can be replicated and better understood, Borman says, it holds tremendous potential for closing persistent achievement gaps both in Wisconsin and the nation.