The goal of this project is to investigate causes of gender differences in achievement striving among Black youth. We will examine the relationships among parent beliefs and practices, adolescent beliefs, and achievement striving in African-American adolescents. We hypothesize that parental socialization messages about discrimination lead children to develop attributional beliefs that deny personal responsibility for achievement outcomes. Instead of attributing academic outcomes to internal factors such as effort or ability, these youth attribute outcomes--particularly failure--to discrimination. Although these beliefs permit Black youth to maintain high self-regard in the face of failure, they do not encourage achievement striving. Because of gender differences in race socialization, Black boys are more likely to develop these attributional beliefs than Black girls, and also to develop identities that emphasize their competence in non-academic realms such as social relationships, sports, and music. In contrast, Black girls are socialized to have racial pride. A strong sense of pride, coupled with beliefs about personal efficacy, enable Black girls to develop self-identities that include a belief in academic competence, thereby enhancing classroom motivation and adaptive responses to failure. We will also examine whether race pride socialization, positive racial identity, and internal attributions reduce gender differences in achievement and achievement striving. We propose to test these hypotheses in a group of 200 African-American youth and their parents. Adolescents will complete measures of race socialization, race centrality, gender and race stereotypes, attributions, perceived competence, classroom engagement, and self-esteem. Standardized achievement scores will be retrieved from school records. Parents will complete measures of race socialization, race centrality, gender and race stereotypes, causal attributions regarding the child's achievement outcomes, and perceptions of the child's competence and achievement striving. Findings from the proposed study should advance our understanding of firmly entrenched gender differences among African-American youth and provide recommendations for points of intervention aimed at African-American boys.
