Stereotype Threat And Gender Threat On Learning - 1797 Words

Learning is an activity that everyone experiences all throughout life. From sitting in a classroom to watching television at home, people are constantly learning from their surroundings. While not everyone learns exactly the same way, there do exist threats to people’s learning that has likely affected everyone. One such example of this is stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is where people feel they should confirm the stereotypes of the social groups such as race and gender. One example of stereotype threat would be an English person living in America feeling pressured to speak a certain way since people believe that is how he would speak. Similar to how stereotyping is considered bad, there are problems with stereotype threat on†¦show more content†¦However, the effects of stereotype effect on learning relating to performance are not too clear. In a series of studies described in a paper by Ganley, Mingle, Ryan, Ryan, and Perry (2013), researchers examined gender s tereotype threat effects on math ability between on grade school students by giving a math test. Consistent between the three studies performed, the results found that there was no significant difference between the groups exposed and not exposed to the stereotype effect but they did find a slight main effect for gender - male scoring higher than female on their math test in two out of three of the studies (Ganley et al, 2013). This leads to the conclusion that either there is no measurable performance effect due to stereotype effect, or that there already stereotype effect has already taken hold on some of the participants. In the second of a series of experiments by Rydell, Rydell, and Boucher (2010), the experimenters taught female participants a novel mathematical operation and manipulated exposure to a negative gender stereotype threat, difficulty of the test and time spent studying. The results of the study suggest when learning a novel task, exposure to stereotype threat may influence how quickly the task can be accurately performed (Rydell et al, 2010). However, the data suggested that stereotype threat depended on the difficulty of the problem itself (Rydell et al, 2010). This is consistent with what most people would think. It would be