Intervention for Improving Grades

The achievement gap is a problem for many younger learners that appears to be impacted by racial and socio-economic factors (Harackiewicz, Canning, Tibbetts, Priniski & Hyde, 2016). However, social psychology interventions can be applied to help reverse the negative impacts of these factors and instill confidence in young students on the wrong end of the achievement gap (Spitzer & Aronson, 2015; Yeager & Walton, 2011). This paper will describe an intervention to address the problem of the achievement gap so as to assist in closing it.

The problem of the achievement gap is one that impacts all of society: educational disparities cause disruptions in the balance of economic opportunities for people around the whole country. As one group excels, another falls behind, which means there are fewer opportunities for the latter to succeed. Closing the achievement gap can help to create more equitability in education and allow for more even job opportunities across all populations (Harackiewicz et al., 2016).

This problem is of interest to me because I have long been aware of the achievement gap and how it can start as early as the first grade and widen from there (Palardy, 2015). I feel that companies should do more to address the achievement gap as they are also impacted by it since it limits the talent pool from which they can draw applicants or potential hires in the future.

The more equitability there is in education, the more that companies will benefit from a larger pool of applicants who have all achieved the same standard of education and skill set acquisition. As John Diamond, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, notes, “It’s not sustainable for society to educate some people and not others” (Ireland, 2007).

Ireland (2007) shows that there is both a material and a symbolic problem at the root of this issue: the best teachers go to the best schools where they can teach the best students from the best communities; students who are behind end up getting teachers at schools that are not nearly as resourceful. If companies want to increase their chances of getting adequate talent in the future, they need to address the source of the problem early on by supporting initiatives that can close the achievement gap.

The behaviors that contribute to this issue are a failure of adequate resources to be evenly distributed among schools and also a failure of students to be challenged and provided with the type of emotional and social support needed to succeed.

Theoretical perspectives from social psychology that are relevant to this issue include self-affirmation theory, which “proposes that reminding people of diverse, positive aspects of themselves can lead people to see negative events and information as less threatening and reduce stress and thus help people function more effectively” (Yeager & Walton, 2011, p. 280). Self-affirmation theory has been found to be applicable in terms of serving as the basis for value affirmation among students on the wrong end of the achievement gap.

Another is incremental theory, which posits that students can improve their grades when given incremental bursts of motivation and positive feedback (Yeager & Walton, 2011). Potential intervention strategies include: · Asking students to write about values that are important to them: as Yeager and Walton (2011) show, “brief value affirmation writing exercises can help negatively stereotyped students perform better on academic tasks” (p. 280).

· Asking students to imagine themselves in the future and what they would like to be doing if they could do anything: as Spitzer and Aronson (2015) show, “imagining possible selves” can help to improve confidence and student performance (p. 1). · Providing students with greater access to role models who can positively shape their academic careers and provide transformational leadership. · Promoting the socialization of reading: as Moses and Kelly (2018) show, the socialization of reading may be helpful in improving students’ academic success.

These potential interventions could be useful in helping to close the achievement gap and give students of all backgrounds a better chance at equitable education and greater job opportunities. Questions I have include how to develop an intervention once one has been settled upon and how to measure its effectiveness. Additional directions I plan to explore through my research are whether these interventions might be more effective at different age levels—for example, if the reading intervention is more effective at younger ages than older ages, and so on.

I would also like to see what evidence there is in terms of longitudinal studies on how role models can impact the achievement gap over the course of a decade. This type of study could be very useful in understanding the best ways to address this issue. My initial thoughts about the final paper are that it should be a valuable exercise in conducting.