Healthy People 2010 (USDHHS, 2000) indicts the inequities in income and education as prime contributing factors to the disparities in mental health outcomes for minority groups in the United States. One obstacle to the educational achievement of ethnic minority college students is the phenomenon of stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is the psychological burden ethnic minorities experience when they fear that they might inadvertently confirm a negative stereotype about their group. This project has three specific aims designed to study this issue.
The first aim i s to better understand the phenomenon of stereotype threat and how it affects academic achievement of racial/ethnic minority students at a comprehensive minority-serving institution. Most research has examined high-achieving minority students at elite universities, but this is not a representative sample of minority college students.
The second aim i s to better understand how stereotype threat affects students in different racial/ethnic minority groups. Most research examines a single minority group in comparison to the majority group. The proposed research will systematically examine the impact of stereotype threat on the academic performance of the three major racial/ethnic minority groups in America to determine commonalities and differences in their responses and these responses will also be compared to the White majority group.
The third aim i s to better understand the full complement of variables that influence the academic achievement of racial/ethnic minority college students, with a particular focus on college generational status. A longterm goal is to develop a clearly specified model of the relationship between stereotype threat and academic achievement, including pertinent moderators and mediators. Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies will be used. Year 1 will utilize focus groups to better understand the college educational experience from the perspective of various racial/ethnic minority college students at a minority-serving comprehensive university. In Year 2, in addition to separation based on ethnicity/race, students will be equally divided based upon whether or not their parents attended college (college generational status). Students will also be divided using a median split technique into high and low GPA groups. A standard stereotype threat manipulation will be implemented and then academic performance on a verbal exam will be measured. In addition, we will collect data on a variety of measures, such as ethnic identity achievement, cultural mistrust, coping strategies, motivational engagement, and academic self-concept, (as well as any new factors suggested by the Year 1 qualitative results) in order to ascertain whether they can account for more variance in the data. ? ?
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