Social-Psychological Interventions

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It is also of paramount importance that educators set high expectations for all students and ensure students that they can meet those expectations, regardless of income and opportunity. While many teachers hold low-opportunity students to a lower standard out of good will, this prevents students from rising to meet high standards and allows more room for bias to come into play (Source G). A study conducted by David Yeager confirms this. During the study, students were given feedback on essays. When they were told “I’m giving you these comments so you’ll have feedback on your paper,” 24% of Black students revised their essays. On the other hand, when they were told, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know …show more content…

Social-psychological interventions are “brief exercises that do not teach academic content, but instead target student’s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school” (Source A, page 3). These have a profound impact; in a Walton and Cohen study, a 1-hour session to increase social belonging among Black college students led to increased GPA of these students over the next three years, halving the black-white achievement gap (Source A).
These small interventions have large impacts by removing significant social barriers to education, such as a feeling of exclusion. In order to be effective, however, a few conditions need to be met. An effective intervention must begin with a precise and accurate understanding of students’ individual experiences in school. Then, the intervention must be specifically targeted to directly address a specific problem with students’ experiences. The interventions must include students actively participating and processing their emotions and knowledge. Additionally, they must be “stealthy.” Direct persuasive appeals or telling students that they are receiving an “intervention” makes students feel controlled, stigmatized, and looked down upon. Finally, interventions must be brief; long interventions can feel controlling or create repetitiveness, preventing information from being internalized (Source …show more content…

The first is accountability. Individuals should be held accountable to explain their decisions related to discipline, grades, and other such manners. This prevents educators from making the snap judgements that promote bias. The second is transparency. Making academic and disciplinary criteria objective, explicit, and well-known helps prevent bias by anchoring decisions to concrete guidelines. The third is allowing sufficient time to make decisions, which prevents educators from defaulting to System 1 thinking. The last is diversity, as intergroup contact challenges stereotypes and biases (Source

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