Stereotypes May Affect Kids' Schoolwork
Excerpt By Merritt McKinney, Reuters Health

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Just like sticks and stones, negative stereotypes can hurt children, new research shows.

A study of Asian-American schoolchildren has found that negative stereotypes can diminish a child's academic performance. On the other hand, positive stereotypes may spur better performance, researchers report in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science.

This suggests that providing children with positive stereotypes or role models may help them do their best, according to a team led by Dr. Nalini Ambady at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Stereotypes have been shown to have an impact on the academic performance of adults, but the impact of prejudices on children has been less clear, Ambady and colleagues point out.

So the researchers tested the influence of stereotypes in youngsters before they took a math test. The investigators conducted separate experiments with Asian-American boys and Asian-American girls. In each experiment, ethnic and gender stereotypes--such as Asian-American boys being good at math--were ``activated'' in the children before they took a math test. Among both boys and girls, a group of students was not exposed to either gender or ethnic stereotypes.

Both positive and negative stereotypes influenced academic performance in most age groups, the authors report.

In kindergartners through 2nd-graders, as well as in children in grades 6 through 8, girls scored worse when gender-based stereotypes were activated but better when ethnic stereotypes were activated. Boys scored better when either of these types of stereotypes were emphasized.

The results of the study ``clearly indicate that both positive and negative self-relevant stereotypes are insidious and can affect the performance of even very young children,'' Ambady and colleagues conclude.

But the effects of stereotypes were not consistent throughout all age groups, according to the researchers. Among children aged 8 to 10, both boys and girls performed best when their gender was stressed.

Children of this age--when the fear of ``cooties'' from the opposite sex is most intense--tend to be ``extremely chauvinistic,'' believing that their own sex is the best, according to the authors.

The good news from the study, according to Ambady's team, is that it suggests children's reactions to stereotypes can be changed.

In an interview with Reuters Health, Ambady said that it might be possible to improve children's academic performance by providing them with positive role models and stereotypes.

She cautioned, however, that it may be too early to propose ways to combat stereotypes until more is known about how stereotypes affect children. Ambady noted that the study was not performed in a school, so the next step is find out whether stereotypes have the same impact in a regular classroom.

Besides studying stereotypes in groups other than Asian Americans, the researchers plan to see whether the ethnic and racial composition of a school alters the effects of stereotypes.

SOURCE: Psychological Science 2001;12:385-390.

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