INFLUENTIAL SCHOLAR TO SPEAK
AT MOUNT HOLYOKE ON "STEREOTYPE THREAT"

South Hadley, MA---Professor Claude M. Steele, an internationally recognized authority on how group stereotypes affect self-image, academic performance and individual behavior, will speak at Mount Holyoke College on Tuesday, September 21. Steele has written extensively on a range of issues, including challenges faced by students of color and women at American institutions of higher education and in other settings. Steele will speak at 7 pm at Gamble Auditorium at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. The event is free, open to the public and accessible to all.

Steele's visit is sponsored by the Office of the President and tied to the work of the Presidential Commission on Diverse Community, a committee of faculty members, students and staff appointed by President Joanne V. Creighton last year and charged with assessing and enhancing the role diversity plays in the school's work environment, community and especially in the curricular and cocurricular dimensions of Mount Holyoke students’ education. Last year, members of the Commission, as well as more than fifty faculty members and administrators, met with two of Steele's colleagues--- Geoffrey Cohen of Yale University and Josh Aronson of New York University---to discuss ensuring the effectiveness of the school as a learning environment for all students.

" Professor Steele is at the forefront of scholars examining how race and gender can interact with societal stereotypes to negatively affect high achieving students of color and women in their academic performance," said Creighton. "His work has great relevance as educational institutions---and our society as a whole---face issues ranging from affirmative action and diversity to questions of how standardized tests measure student abilities."

A significant focus of Steele's work has been on how explicit or implicit societal attitudes regarding race, ethnicity and gender can affect the academic performance of students of color and women, as well as the expectations of faculty members, while often bolstering the performance of majority students. For example, as part of his work, Steele and his colleagues have looked at reasons why the abilities of high-achieving African-Americans and women are underrepresented on standardized tests such as the SAT. According to material posted on the Web as part of "Secrets of the SAT," a 1999 documentary by the PBS investigative magazine, Frontline:

" Recent studies have shown that later in life, when those students who make it to college and post-graduate studies are faced with standardized tests such as the SAT and the GRE, new factors come into play which might contribute to the gap. Stanford psychology professor Claude Steele and his colleagues have described what they call 'stereotype threat.' According to their research, a student who feels he is part of a group that has been negatively stereotyped is likely to perform less well in a situation in which he thinks that people might evaluate him through that stereotype than in a situation in which he feels no such pressure.

" Steele has conducted experiments in which he brings in black students and white students to take a standardized test. The first time, he tells the students that they will be taking a test to measure their verbal and reasoning ability. The second time, he tells them the test is an unimportant research tool. Steele has found that the black students do less well when they are told that the test measures their abilities. He also believes that the effects of stereotype threat are strongest for students who are high-achievers and care very much about doing well. They care so much about doing well, Steele says, that they feel that if they don't they will be confirming the negative stereotypes associated with black students." (Frontline has published an interview with Steele at:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/interviews/steele.html)

Interestingly, Steele has also found in the test situations comparing white students and students of color that the performance of white students is enhanced by the same conditions under which the performance of minority students is diminished. In fact, this "stereotype lift" may be a factor in the persistence of racism among members of the majority, who benefit from situations where expectations, both positive and negative, are keyed to race.

Claude Steele is the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1991. He has also been a faculty member at the Universities of Michigan, Washington, and Utah. Throughout his career he has been interested in how people cope with self-image threat. His theory of “self-affirmation” describes processes for coping with this threat, and his theory of “stereotype threat” describes how negative group stereotypes--through the self-evaluative and belongingness threats they pose--can affect important behaviors like intellectual performance and intergroup relations. He has also studied addictive behaviors.