Social Belonging Is Key to Self-Affirmation Interventions | PERTS

For some students, feeling socially connected can help raise their scores.

Being a student isn?t easy. Not only do they have to worry about their third period math test, but they also have to deal with social stressors, like bullying and making friends. School can be especially stressful for minority students who have to deal with feeling like they are being stereotyped on a daily basis. This can make students feel like they don?t belong or that people are constantly judging them.? This causes young people to lose faith that they are being treated fairly in this setting and that their academic success is beyond their control.

Fortunately, scientists have found that writing exercises that affirm students? non-academic values?often referred to as self-affirmation interventions?help to combat the effects of negative stereotyping. In self-affirmation interventions, students are asked to write an essay about an important non-academic value, like family, friends, or sports. Bringing a non-academic value into the classroom?one that is not susceptible to threat in an academic environment? is thought to reduce students? overall level of threat and anxiety by broadening their sense of self-worth. In past research, self-affirmation interventions have reduced the racial achievement gap by 30%, and this effect was sustained for multiple years (Cohen, Garcia, Purdie-Vaughns, Apfel, & Brzustoski, 2009).

Recently, scientists wanted to know if there was a specific theme that could account for the positive effects of the essays. They found that those who wrote about social belonging in their essays had the largest boost in academic performance. Essays were considered to have a social belonging theme if students talked about something important to them that made them feel more socially connected to others, such as playing soccer with friends.

Feeling uncertain about belonging can make students feel threatened and anxious. Trying to suppress worry about belonging can use up valuable cognitive resources that otherwise could be used to concentrate in class or perform well on a test. Questions of belonging are especially salient during challenging transitions, such as the transition to college. For students who are negatively stereotyped, their sense of belonging is much more uncertain during these transitions. Affirming one?s sense of belonging therefore plays a large role in affirming one?s general sense of self-worth.

In a study by Shnabel et al., African American seventh graders and college-aged women who wrote about social belonging showed significant academic improvement. These findings are exciting in light of looming achievement gaps in the United States. Negatively stereotyped minority students continue to lag behind their white peers and women are grossly underrepresented in STEM fields. Across the country, stereotyped students do worse on standardized tests and have lower GPAs.

PERTS designs and implements self-affirmation interventions and programs that focus on increasing feelings of belonging. The goal of our belonging interventions is to help students realize that feeling uncertain about belonging is normal and gets better over time. After reading summaries from past students, current middle school students are asked to write about how their own questions of belonging will also subside over time. For example, in a recent intervention, one student said, ?I think after a while people fit in because they have more friends and they are getting to know more people at school.?

Our belonging interventions help students feel less anxious about belonging by normalizing it, which in turn leaves them with more brainpower for their schoolwork. These interventions significantly impact grades for lower achieving students. Once students stop worrying so much about their belonging, they are able to focus on their academics. For a student whose life experiences have led them to view school through a negative lens, changing key beliefs can have a tremendous impact on their academic and career trajectories.

Shnabel, N., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Cook, J. E., Garcia, J., Cohen, G. L., (In press). Demystifying values-affirmation interventions: Writing about social belonging is a key to buffering against identity threat. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

?For more information about self-affirmation and belonging, please click on the links below.

Walton, G. M. & Cohen, G. L. (2007). A question of belonging: Race, social fit, and achievement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92(1), 82-96. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.92.1.82

?Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2001). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science 331(1126), 1447-1451. doi: 10.1126/science.1198364.

?Cohen, G. L., Garcia, J., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Apfel, N., & Brzustoski, P. (2009). Recursive processes in self-affirmation: Intervening to close the minority achievement gap. Science 324(5925), 400-403. doi: 10.1126/science.1170769

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