Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

Stereotypes affect on Intellectual Test Performance

The October 9, 2003 issue of Black Issues in Higher Education reported on an issue that has caught my eye every now and then.


Yale researchers have found that the existance of negatove stereotypes about abilities such as intelligence actually enhances the performance of those who do not bear the stereotype..." Our evidence suggests tat 'stereotype lift' improves the performance of White men on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) by, on average, 50 points.."

...Walton and his co-author, Dr. Geoffrey Cohen, a psychological professor at Yale, said only when negative stereotypes were explicitly rendered irrelevant to the test did the lift effect disappear. 'Otherwise people automatically assume the stereotypes are relevant and their performance benefits."

Meanwhile, the August 2003 issue had an article, "Charter Schools Produce Higher Test Scores, But Segregated Environment" In which it was shown that Black students in charter schools performed 7 percentile points higher in Math and 8 percentile points higher in reading. If one took into account that the highest score possible on either section of the SAT is 800 and 1 percent of that is 8 points. Then a 7 percentile increase would be a 56 point increase in math and 64 point increase in reading scores for these students. Overall that would be a whopping 120 increase in SAT scores. Now the thrust of the article was that 70% of black charter school students were in segregated environments vs. 34 percent. This makes a great lie of the 1954 Brown Vs. Board of Education claim that it would be damaging to black students to be educated away from white students.
So what could it be in that mostly/all black environment that helps with academic performance. Perhaps being out of an enviroment where blacks are seen and expected to be entertainment, the "sterotype effect" helps them out.

Black folks need to wake up and send a clear message to so called black leadership: Segregation is not the issue. our attitudes are.