You’ve come to Dr Marc’s lab to take part in a study. I start by telling you the study is about “personal factors involved in performance on problems requiring reading and verbal reasoning abilities”. Don’t expect to get many answers right; this is a real “test of your verbal abilities and limitations” so I can get an idea of your verbal ability. Are you feeling the pressure yet?
If I did this in the US in the early 1990s, as Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson did, I’d find that people got about half the answers right, but African Americans would do a smidgen worse than “whites”, even controlling for previous performance on standardised aptitude tests (the SATs that Americans are obsessed with).
Importantly, though, African Americans did just as well as Caucasian Americans if the instructions talked about “solving verbal problems” and not “verbal ability”. Why? Steele and Aronson say it’s because of stereotype threat – the psychological threat that comes when you have to do something that a dominant stereotype says you’re not supposed to be good at.
In the US of the 1990s, and probably 2023, the stereotype of African Americans doesn’t include being good at word stuff and, because African Americans know this is a test of verbal ability and they’re not supposed to be good at it – well, internalising that stereotype and the anxiety that goes with being in a verbal test means you underperform.
Since then, there’s been a lot of research to show women do worse on tasks when they’re told they measure intelligence or maths ability, or that older people do badly on tasks when they’re told they assess memory. Because dominant stereotypes say women aren’t good at maths and old people have poor memories.
I‘m thinking of this as I read about some cool research by University of Auckland professor of education Melinda Webber. At the recent New Zealand Psychological Society conference, Webber gave a plenary (or “fancy big talk”) about her research looking at how tamariki and rangatahi feel about school, their performance, and their identity. I’ve been involved in some big surveys in my time, but I’m pretty jealous of Webber’s results based on almost 20,000 young people around Aotearoa.
If I hop to the punchline, it’s that Māori grow up being told they’re less worthy academically. The history they are taught is replete with white-skinned heroes, adventurers and scientists. They are given every reason, Webber suggests, to believe they’re not supposed to be good at the maths and stuff that happens in schools and universities.
In spite of this, and contrary to the stereotypes, most young Māori are flourishing or thriving at school – more than half, in fact. They’re motivated, engaged, and think they’re at least doing okay. Three other groups – the strivers, survivors and strugglers – are less motivated and engaged, and don’t think they’re doing quite as well.
The major difference between those who are doing well and those who aren’t doing as well as they could isn’t whether they have supportive families or a teacher who believes in them, though these are important. The flourishers and the strugglers are equally likely to want to go to university, equally likely to want to get a good job.
Where they’re most markedly different is how they feel about their culture; the flourishers and thrivers have a strong sense of pride in their culture and believe that others value their culture as well. This decreases as we move from flourishing to struggling.
What they need, Webber says, are more positive stories about themselves, for example that their ancestors were epic navigators, practitioners of agricultural and physical sciences, and exponents of traditional arts.
If we had a more balanced curriculum, she argues, we would encourage more of the striving, just surviving and struggling young folk into thriving and flourishing.
