View Content #210
| Contentid | 210 |
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| Content Type | 1 |
| Title | Minority Students With Complex Beliefs About Ethnic Identity Are Found to Do Better in School By DAVID GLENN |
| Body | Monday, June 2, 2003 THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION Minority Students With Complex Beliefs About Ethnic Identity Are Found to Do Better in School By DAVID GLENN Atlanta Ethnic-minority adolescents tend to do better in school if they have relatively complex beliefs about their ethnic identities, according to three studies presented on Friday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society here. The findings may suggest answers to paradoxes in the existing social-science literature on ethnicity and school performance. The studies, whose lead author is Daphna Oyserman, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, examined the "racial self-schemas" of African-American, Latino, and Native American adolescents in the American Midwest, and of Arab students in Israel. Ms. Oyserman and her colleagues interviewed the students about how, if at all, their ethnicity shaped their self-concepts, and then compared those interviews to the students' grades and school attendance or to their persistence on a mathematical task. The researchers grouped the students' racial self-concepts into four categories, two of which appear to be correlated with better academic performance and two with disengagement. (Students were sorted into the four categories by research assistants who coded their interview answers; the assistants were kept blind to the students' academic performance and to the hypothesis of the study.) The two apparently helpful types of racial self-concept are relatively complex. One of them, which Ms. Oyserman terms a "dual identity," is an optimistic, assimilationist position, in which students have positive beliefs both about their own ethnic group and about their membership in the larger society. The second type, which the researchers call a "minority" identity, combines positive beliefs about the student's ethnic group with skepticism toward the larger society. Students with "minority" identities vigilantly watch for instances of prejudice, but they remain pragmatically engaged with the larger society even as they criticize it. In all three studies, students with these complex self-concepts were significantly more likely than their peers to perform well on school tasks. The "dual" and "minority" identities appear to be equally helpful; Ms. Oyserman and her colleagues have not yet detected a significant difference between their effects. In contrast to those two helpful, complex self-concepts are "in-group-focused" identities and "aschematic" identities. "In-group-focused" students -- who were by far the largest category in the American, but not the Israeli, studies -- have positive beliefs about their in-group but express no sense of membership in the larger society, not even the skeptical engagement claimed by the "minority" students. These highly alienated students tend to reject norms of academic achievement and to embrace an "oppositional culture" of the sort identified by John U. Ogbu, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. "Social-identity theorists have said that it's important to have a positive in-group identity, but they've sort of left it at that," said Ms. Oyserman in an interview. "I thought, Hmm, well, is it really that simple? It seemed to me that there are multiple ways that you can have a racial schema." Ms. Oyserman's work may help to untangle the puzzle of self-esteem studies, according to Susan T. Fiske, a professor of psychology at Princeton University and the departing president of the society. In an interview, Ms. Fiske said that many African-American students report that they care a great deal about education, and yet retain positive self-concepts even as they withdraw from schoolwork. Ms. Oyserman's studies, she said, "might begin to explain how this could be so." (In April, the society issued a report that generally debunks the notion that self-esteem is important to one's competence, happiness, or health.) In the final category are students with "aschematic" ethnic identities -- meaning |
| Source | THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION |
| Inputdate | 2003-06-02 11:25:00 |
| Lastmodifieddate | 2003-06-02 11:25:00 |
| Expdate | Not set |
| Publishdate | Not set |
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| Active | 1 |
| Emailed | 1 |
| Isarchived | 1 |
