Panel Paper:
Effects of the “Achievement Gap Discourse” on the Public’s Biased Academic Expectations and Implicit Racial Stereotypes
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Study 1 participants (n=514) were obtained through Qualtrics online survey panels, limited to respondents in the US age 18 or over. Respondents were randomly assigned to view one of two videos: an “achievement gap narrative” (AG) video versus a counter-stereotypical (CS) video. The AG narrative video was a 129-second clip from a TV newscast from a CBS affiliate in Minnesota (WCCO - CBS Minnesota, 2016) reporting on racial achievement gaps on a recent state achievement test. The counter-stereotypical video was a 213-second video from Harlem Children’s Zone, counter-stereotypical for its anti-deficit presentations of (almost exclusively) Black students as studious, academically ambitious, and engaged with their positive school environments (Harlem Children’s Zone, 2015).
To measure racial bias in academic expectations, I administered the item: “The national high school graduation rate for White students is 86%. What is your best guess of what the national high school graduation rate is for Black students?” The larger the respondent believed the difference to be compared to the actual difference, the more biased the respondent’s academic expectations are (compared to actual Black graduation rate of 78% [Murnane, 2013]). To measure implicit racial stereotypes, I developed an implicit association test (IAT; Nosek & Banaji, 2001) relating race (Black/White) and competence.
Random assignment to the AG video increased respondents’ implicit stereotyping by .25 sd. Random assignment to the AG video decreased respondents’ graduate rate guesses (i.e., increased bias) by 6.59 percentage points.
In the second study, I recruited respondents through Amazon mturk (n=723) and paid them $1.50 for participating. Each respondent was randomly assigned to one of three videos: the AG or CS video from Study 1, or a third control video. The control video was a 175-second video from Khan Academy (KA) describing an application of the Pythagorean Theorem (Khan Academy, 2011)
In Study 2, condition did not significantly affect IAT scores. However, an analysis pooling the Study 1 sample with the AG and CS groups from Study 2 showed a significant effect of .135 sd. The effect of the AG video did not differ significantly across samples. Condition had a significant effect on respondents’ biased academic expectations. Participants in the control group (KA video) estimated that the Black graduation rate was 62%. Being randomly assigned to the news clip decreased respondents’ graduation rate guesses for Black students (i.e., increased bias) by 7 percentage points compared to the control video, but random assignment to the CS video had no significant effect on bias (compared to the control video).
Through future research, we must gain a fuller understanding of the effects of various ways of framing or emphasizing data regarding race and achievement, and of how we can most productively conduct a public discourse that advances educational equity.
