FALUDI If You Believe Then You Can Achieve: Stereotype Threat Analysis

Essentially, the overarching point of Joshua Aronson's article entitled "The Threat of Stereotype" is to evaluate means of reducing the performance gap that traditionally exists between male Caucasian students and disparate groups of minorities including African-Americans, Latinos, and women in fields of mathematics. Aronson's primary method for achieving this goal is through an analysis of a phenomenon known as stereotype threat, a syndrome that occurs when people of certain demographics are put in academic situations in which they feel a sense of anxiety due to negative perceptions of the intellectual capacity of their demographic. The author not only demonstrates a number of examples in which this phenomenon actually occurs, but he examines why stereotype threat has a negative influence on academic performance, and even offers a number of solutions...

One group served as a control, while the other group was informed that the test was not a measure of ability. Convincingly, African-American students in the latter group scored nearly twice as well as the control (Aronson 2004) -- which demonstrated the fact that the negative academic performances related to stereotype threat are psychological in nature and not accurate indicators of the aptitude of certain groups. The author explores the myriad ramifications of this finding throughout the duration of the article's remainder, in which he proves that this phenomenon can be…