What Research Says About Race-Linked Barriers to Achievement

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Colloquy: Read the transcript of an online discussion with Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and Susan B. Layden, associate dean of student affairs at Skidmore College, about their success in helping minority students earn high grades.

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A growing body of research suggests that minority college students' race and ethnicity affect their academic performance. Some researchers say subtle factors, like fears of not fitting in or perceptions that professors have low expectations of them, may hinder the progress of today's nonwhite students more than blatant discrimination does.

Skeptics have attacked many such studies as flawed and questioned whether the obstacles they describe are real.

What influences the achievement of minority students? These are among the areas in which research is yielding some clues:

Perceptions of isolation and prejudice:

On the basis of her own research and of reviews of others' studies, Sharon Fries-Britt, an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland at College Park, has found that in an effort to fit in, some high-achieving black students hide their enrollment in challenging courses from lower-achieving black peers.

Many others, especially those at selective colleges, report constantly feeling that they must justify their admission by proving themselves in their classes, causing them to feel alienated from their white peers.

Claude M. Steele, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has extensively documented "stereotype threat," a phenomenon that occurs when students perceive others as having low opinions of their abilities.

In several experiments, Mr. Steele and other researchers have shown that some people do worse on a test if given the impression that a poor performance would confirm a negative stereotype about their racial or ethnic group. Some students' fear of failure is so profound that it causes their blood pressure to rise. Although stereotype threat has been observed repeatedly in experiments, however, researchers are unsure of its impact on students' performance in everyday settings.

A related line of research suggests that changing the way minority students think about intelligence may help them overcome the effects of stereotype threat. Carol S. Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford, and Joshua Aronson, an associate professor of applied psychology at New York University, have found that people are less vulnerable to stereotype threat — and remain committed to learning a subject — if they believe that intelligence is not fixed, and that they can increase their mental capacities with effort.

Interactions with family and faculty members:

Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, has written two books on how black families can raise their children to succeed as students.

High achievers, he has found, tend to describe their parents as nurturing, determined to help them succeed academically, and willing to impose strict discipline. Most of those students also reported having strong connections with their extended families.

Colleges do not have much say over how minority students interact with their families, but they can try to shape interactions between such students and their professors. Research on student-faculty interactions at predominantly white institutions has found that black students have more contact with their instructors than other students do — but that they are less happy with it. Many regard faculty members as racially insensitive, and some complain that instructors have patronized them with excessive praise or have accused them of cheating when they turned in excellent work.

Studies by Stanford's Mr. Steele and by Geoffrey L. Cohen, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, have found that black students are much likelier than their white peers to regard constructive criticism from an instructor as evidence that the instructor is biased against them. That tendency disappears, however, when instructors use "wise criticism" — prefacing critical feedback by explaining that they are holding the students to high expectations that they believe the students are capable of meeting.

Involvement in campus organizations and study groups:

For decades researchers have suggested that participating in campus organizations can help students succeed in college. But Douglas A. Guiffrida, an assistant professor of counseling and human development at the University of Rochester, has done work showing that not all black students benefit from such involvement. Those who assumed leadership roles without learning to delegate responsibility, and who put campus organizations above their studies, often earned low grade-point averages.

A nuanced picture is also emerging from research on students' involvement in study groups. In the late 1970s, P. Uri Treisman, then a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, observed that Asian-American college students appeared to benefit from participating in study groups. He subsequently improved the performance of black students in his undergraduate calculus classes by having them participate in racially integrated study groups when tackling difficult material. His work inspired similar efforts throughout academe.

In 2005, however, Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles, analyzed survey data from 4,000 law-school graduates and found that, while white and Asian-American law students improved their grades by participating in study groups, black and Hispanic students did not.

A follow-up survey indicated that many black and Hispanic students felt excluded from white groups and ended up studying with other minority students. The result was often some degree of academic segregation, since the other students in their group tended to be struggling as well.