Stereotypes at PHLS

Stereotypes are everywhere and can often create problems for people, however they become even more detrimental with teens, especially at schools. Writer and science correspondent for the NRA, Shankar Vedantam, in his article, “How a Self-Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance,” explains that stereotypes can hurt the performance of the one that it is associated with. He supports his claim by first explaining that how well people do on tests are determined on who administers the questions, then he explains that studies show that when people take tests and they are reminded of negative stereotypes that associate with them, then they don’t do as well, and finally he states that the studies are being widely ignored by all the people which should take heed of the findings, such as test makers and college acceptance people. Vedantam’s purpose is to tell you about the research conducted by Huang in order to inform you that stereotypes can affect performance on tests.

In my 9th grade class at Point Loma High School, we were given questions about stereotypes from our teacher to interview two students. Each of us then interviewed one to two students at our school and then imputed the data into a google form. Afterwards we looked at the summary of the data in charts and got a better idea of who we interviewed, the things associated with, and where they felt the most affected by stereotype threats. Then we sorted the summary data chart by race and gender to see either similarities or differences in each race or gender group.

When my class then did some research about stereotypes by interviewing students at our school we ended up interviewing 165 students. 79% of the people were in 9th grade, the rest made up evenly of 10th, 11th, ...

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...rains and there is nothing we can do to stop the split second stereotypes our brain automatically does. Even though we can not stop our brain from stereotyping we can suppress and correct it, because if we don’t, the stereotypes could lead to problems. As Kang proved that we will subconsciously stereotype others we should still do all we can to stop big, conscious stereotypes from occurring.

I believe our school should take a step towards improving its culture by getting rid of stereotypes and promoting equality. To make our school a better and safer place we should try and stop people from thinking about and believing stereotypes. So students will not be hindered in any aspect of their school experience, and so they may do their best and get a fair chance for their future.

Works Cited

Shankar Vedantam, “How a Self-Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance”