KEVIN B. KLAUS/Arizona Summer Wildcat Education and psychology senior Olga Ayon reviews a test for a study on stereotype threat last Tuesday in the psychology building. Stereotype threat is when a person performs poorly because they are being stereotyped against.

Stereotypes may affect scores

To examine the effects stereotyping has on how well college students perform on tests, Toni Schmader, a UA assistant psychology professor, will receive a $400,000 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in August.

With a research team that includes UA doctoral psychology student Michael J. Johns, Schmader will continue to test a condition known as "stereotype threat" and how it primarily affects women and Hispanics.

"People are thought to experience stereotype threat whenever they find themselves in a situation where they fear that they might inadvertently do something that would confirm a negative stereotype about a social group they belong to," Schmader said.

She explained that students who do poorly on a particular test might have done much better on the same test if there were not negative stereotypes.

When students feel they are "put on the spot" because of their ethnicity or gender, "they might have lower working memory capacity in these situations because they expend some of their cognitive resources monitoring their performance for signs they are doing well or are doing poorly," Schmader said.

The research Schmader and her team plan to conduct will take four years.

"The goal of this project is to discover the nature of the emotional, cognitive and physiological processes that explain why women do more poorly on a math test if they are simply told that it is a math test," Schmader said. "We hope that identifying these mechanisms will point us to strategies that people can use to combat stereotype threat."

Hispanic students make up 13.3 percent of the UA student body, while women make up 53 percent of the student body. About 75 percent of psychology students are women, according to Schmader.

Even though the study will primarily involve women and Hispanics, Schmader said that stereotype threat affects both sexes and people of all ethnic backgrounds.

"Research over the past nine years has established that stereotype threat can occur with many different groups in many different domains," she said. "It's been shown to affect women taking a math test, children of low socioeconomic status taking an intelligence test and the elderly when taking a memory test.

"White men experience stereotype threat when taking a math test if they are told that their performance will be compared to that of Asian men."

Having studied stereotyping for five years, Schmader hopes to gain a better understanding of how educating students about stereotype threat will benefit or harm them in the future when taking tests.

Professor Claude Steele and researcher Joshua Aronson first identified and studied stereotype threat at Stanford University in 1995 after conducting experiments with white and black college students.

When the students were told that a test would evaluate their "verbal ability," black students scored significantly lower, according to Schmader.

"However, when the same exact test was simply described as a problem solving exercise to another group of students, black students performed significantly better on the test and had scores that were equivalent to the scores of their white peers," Schmader said.

"Simply knowing that the task was measuring their ability in a domain where they were stereotyped to be inferior was enough to bring negative stereotypes to mind for the black students and interfere with their ability to do well on the test."

As part of Schmader's research, similar diagnostic tests will be administered to male and female first-year psychology students at the UA. Other tests will examine the psychological and physiological effects of stereotype threat.

"In one set of studies, we will measure women's cortisol levels after they take the test," Schmader said. Cortisol is a hormone produced by the brain when people are under stress. "If stereotype threat elicits a physiological stress response, we might expect to find increased levels of stress hormones, such as cortisol, in women as compared to men."

In addition, Schmader said that some research shows that individuals experience "increased arousal under stereotype threat," such as increased blood pressure. This could have a negative effect on how well students perform on tests, especially if they think this arousal is a sign that they are doing poorly.

"Another possibility is that stereotype threat reduces working memory capacity because women are expending some of their cognitive resources trying not to feel anxious.

"The problem with this is that trying to suppress our emotions usually absorbs cognitive resources - in this case, the same cognitive resources that might be necessary to do well on the test," Schmader said.

"If this is true, then if we tell women, and men, ... that anxiety might actually be good for their performance, they should no longer feel the motivation to try to suppress anxiety and they might actually do better on the test."