Nancy H. Apfel

Reducing the Racial Achievement Gap: A Social-Psychological Intervention

Two randomized field experiments tested a social-psychological intervention designed to improve minority student performance and increase our understanding of how psychological threat mediates performance in chronically evaluative real-world environments. We expected that the risk of confirming a negative stereotype aimed at ones group could undermine academic performance in minority students by elevating their level of psychological threat. We tested whether such psychological threat could be lessened by having students reaffirm their sense of personal adequacy or “self-integrity.” The intervention, a brief in-class writing assignment, significantly improved the grades of African American students and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40%. These results suggest that the racial achievement gap, a major social concern in the United States, could be ameliorated by the use of timely and targeted social-psychological interventions.

Effects of family support intervention: a ten-year follow-up.

The delivery to impoverished mothers of a coordinated set of medical and social services, including day-care for their children, had effects that were evident a decade after the intervention ended. Intervention mothers were more likely to be self-supporting, and they had higher educational attainment and smaller family sizes than did control mothers. Intervention children had better school attendance, and boys were less likely to require costly special school services than were corresponding control children. The financial implications of these results were considerable, totaling about

Four Models of Adolescent Mother-Grandmother Relationships in Black Inner-City Families.

40,000 in extra estimated welfare costs and documented school service costs needed by the 15 control families in the single year in which these follow-up data were gathered. There were no indications that the intervention had lasting effects on the childrens IQ scores. The results suggest that family support procedures, including quality day-care, have considerable promise as a general model for intervention programs.

2: Evaluating Parental Effects on Child Development

From interviews conducted with inner-city black adolescent mothers and their mothers (or surrogate mothers), four conceptual models of familial adaptation to adolescent parenthood were discerned: (1) Parental Replacement, (2) Parental Supplement, (3) Supported Primary Parent, (4) Parental Apprentice. This conceptual framework goes beyond considerations of living arrangement and household composition to provide practitioners in medical, school, and social service settings a method to better understand the triadic relationship of mother-grandmother-grandchild, and thus to intervene more effectively.

Effects of an intervention program for pregnant adolescents: Educational outcomes at two years postpartum

Rapid change in social conditions, in housing customs, recreations, social mores . . . makes a demand upon parents for a philosophy and methods based on today, (NSSE Yearbook, p. 67) [while] The community, examining the child at the close of his preschool and most fundamental years, and finding him wanting, consistently lays the responsibility for this lack at the door of the home, [and], further, demands that the home remedy the situation. Forest (1927), p. 231

Self-affirmation facilitates minority middle schoolers' progress along college trajectories

Examined postpartum effects of a school-based intervention program for pregnant adolescents. Interviews were conducted with 102 innercity black, low-income, school-aged mothers who had attended the program, and their academic and medical records were reviewed. For teenagers who had been poor students prior to becoming pregnant, a strong linear effect was found for duration of program attendance: with sufficient time in the program, poorer students became indistinguishable from better students in educational success. Most of the better students were educationally successful at 2 years postpartum, independent of their length of time in the program. For all students, longer durations of postnatal intervention were predictive of lower likelihood of subsequent childbearing. Numerous academic, medical, social, and demographic variables were ruled out as possible confounding factors that might have produced the positive educational outcomes for poorer students. The results suggest that adolescents who appear to have minimal academic promise prior to their pregnancy are nevertheless very responsive to school-based intervention.

Changing Environments by Changing Individuals: The Emergent Effects of Psychological Intervention

Significance This research represents an experimental investigation of how a psychological process unfolds over many years to affect success at a later period of transition, even almost a decade later. A series of 15-min reflective writing exercises not only closed academic performance gaps in early adolescence but, years later, improved drivers of academic and economic opportunity among minority youth: high school course choices, college enrollment, and 4-y college selectivity. Long-term benefits occurred despite the barriers that confront minority students on the path to college. A psychological intervention can have a persistent positive effect when it ushers people onto positive structural pathways. Small but timely experiences can have long-term benefits when their psychological effects interact with institutional processes. In a follow-up of two randomized field experiments, a brief values affirmation intervention designed to buffer minority middle schoolers against the threat of negative stereotypes had long-term benefits on college-relevant outcomes. In study 1, conducted in the Mountain West, the intervention increased Latino Americans’ probability of entering a college readiness track rather than a remedial one near the transition to high school 2 y later. In study 2, conducted in the Northeast, the intervention increased African Americans’ probability of college enrollment 7–9 y later. Among those who enrolled in college, affirmed African Americans attended relatively more selective colleges. Lifting a psychological barrier at a key transition can facilitate students’ access to positive institutional channels, giving rise to accumulative benefits.

Recursive Processes in Self-Affirmation: Intervening to Close the Minority Achievement Gap

The two studies reported here tested whether a classroom-based psychological intervention that benefited a few African American 7th graders could trigger emergent ecological effects that benefited their entire classrooms. Multilevel analyses were conducted on data that previously documented the benefits of values affirmations on African American students’ grades. The density of African American students who received the intervention in each classroom (i.e., treatment density) was used as an independent predictor of grades. Within a classroom, the greater the density of African American students who participated in the intervention exercise, the higher the grades of all classmates on average, regardless of their race or whether they participated in the intervention exercise. Benefits of treatment density were most pronounced among students with a history of poor performance. Results suggest that the benefits of psychological intervention do not end with the individual. Changed individuals can improve their social environments, and such improvements can benefit others regardless of whether they participated in the intervention. These findings have implications for understanding the emergence of ecological consequences from psychological processes.