This brief writing assignment significantly improved the grades of African-American students, and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40 percent. Why? The exercise affirmed students self-integrity, Cohen explains, buttressing their self-worth and alleviating the stress they felt about being evaluated. Cohen and another group of co-authors investigated whether a similar approach would help female college students taking an introductory physics course who might be feeling vulnerable to negative messages about women in science. Once again, students chose their most cherished values from a list and then wrote about why these values were important to them. Conducted just twice during the 15-week course, this intervention had a big impact, substantially reducing the difference between men and women in learning and performance and lifting womens grades from the C range to the B range. These results, reported in the journal Science in 2010, were especially pronounced for women who say they believe the stereotype that men do better than women in physics.
Perhaps the most inventive way to get students to focus on the bigger picture of what matters to them was introduced by a group of researchers from Germany and Austria in an article published in the European Journal of Social Psychology last year. They asked university students to think about their ancestors by drawing a family tree or by writing an essay imagining how their forebears lived and what advice they would give them. The students who thought and wrote about their ancestors did better on subsequent intelligence tests than members of the control group .
【备战四级阅读练习:压力之下表现优异的秘密】相关文章:
最新
2016-10-18
2016-10-11
2016-10-11
2016-10-08
2016-09-30
2016-09-30