Abstract
Previous research showed that a values-affirmation intervention can help reduce the achievement gap between African American and European American students in the US. In the present study, it was examined if these results would generalize to ethnic minority students in a country outside the US, namely the Netherlands, where there is also an achievement gap between native and ethnic minority students. This type of intervention was tested in two separate studies, the first among first-year pre-vocational students (n = 361, 84% ethnic minority), and the second among sixth grade students (n = 290, 96% ethnic minority). Most minority participants had a Turkish-Dutch or Moroccan-Dutch immigrant background. In the second study, a third condition was added to the original paradigm, in which students elaborated on either their affirmation- or a control exercise with the help of a teaching assistant. We also examined whether values affirmation affected the level of problem behavior of negatively stereotyped ethnic minority youth. Contrary to what was expected, multilevel analyses revealed that the intervention had no effect on the school achievement or the problem behavior of the ethnic minority students. Possible explanations for these findings, mainly related to contextual and cultural differences between the Netherlands and the US, are discussed.
Highlights
In many countries around the world, there is a so-called ‘achievement gap’ between native and ethnic minority students
Data are included in the Supplementary Materials
The present study investigated whether the positive effects of a values-affirmation on the school performance of ethnic minority students found in earlier studies (e.g., Cohen et al, 2006b, 2009), would generalize to a negatively stereotyped minority group outside the US
Summary
In many countries around the world, there is a so-called ‘achievement gap’ between native and ethnic minority students. Ethnic minority students underperform in school in comparison to native students (Marks, 2005; Fryer and Levitt, 2006; Pásztor, 2008; Woolf et al, 2013) This gap remains even after controlling for differences in socio-economic status (SES; e.g., Pásztor, 2008; Azzolini et al, 2012; Woolf et al, 2013). In the US, African American students are negatively stereotyped in the academic domain. When these students find themselves in a situation in which the negative stereotype applies, they have been shown to underperform in comparison to students who are not negatively stereotyped in that situation (Steele and Aronson, 1995)
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