Treating Students as Gifted Yields Impressive Academic Results, Study Finds

“Durham, NC – Schools that seek to help students who are underrepresented in advanced programs should treat them as gifted young scholars, an approach that can result in many of them actually performing at a gifted level within a few years, according to a U.S. Dept. of Education study of a North Carolina program.

Developed by researchers at Duke University with state educators, the five-year study of 10,000 kindergarteners and first- and second-graders suggests that raising expectations could be a key to enhancing the academic performance of at-risk students nationwide.

‘All students should get a gifted education, even if they are not subsequently identified as gifted,’ said William ‘Sandy’ Darity, chair of African and African American studies and a professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. ‘It’s not about who is in the class, but the quality of instruction.’ ” – Camille Jackson, Duke Today

Read the full article here.

Stereotype threat prevents perceptual learning
Robert J. Rydell, Richard M. Shiffrin, Kathryn L. Boucher, Katie Van Loo, and Michael T. Rydell

Abstract

“Stereotype threat (ST) refers to a situation in which a member of a group fears that her or his performance will validate an existing negative performance stereotype, causing a decrease in performance. For example, reminding women of the stereotype ‘women are bad at math’ causes them to perform more poorly on math questions from the SAT and GRE. Performance deficits can be of several types and be produced by several mechanisms. We show that ST prevents perceptual learning, defined in our task as an increasing rate of search for a target Chinese character in a display of such characters. Displays contained two or four characters and half of these contained a target. Search rate increased across a session of training for a control group of women, but not women under ST. Speeding of search is typically explained in terms of learned ‘popout’ (automatic attraction of attention to a target). Did women under ST learn popout but fail to express it? Following training, the women were shown two colored squares and asked to choose the one with the greater color saturation. Superimposed on the squares were task-irrelevant Chinese characters. For women not trained under ST, the presence of a trained target on one square slowed responding, indicating that training had caused the learning of an attention response to targets. Women trained under ST showed no slowing, indicating that they had not learned such an attention response.”

Robert J. Rydell, Richard M. Shiffrin, Kathryn L. Boucher, Katie Van Loo, Michael T. Rydell. Stereotype threat prevents perceptual learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1002815107

Correspondence should be addressed: rjrydell@indiana.edu.