Brief social psychological interventions to reduce academic achievement gap

Disparities in academic achievement between different social groups persist. Even though several structural factors are known to contribute to these gaps, psychological processes have been also suggested to play a major role, especially among minority or female students. A major social psychological phenomenon that has been shown to interfere with academic motivation and performance is one's feeling of threat to his/her social identity or sense of belonging. Brief Social Psychological Interventions (BSPIs) which aim to change the disadvantaged students' thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are suggested to successfully eliminate the detrimental effects of these psychological challenges. The objective of the present thesis was to examine the effectiveness of BSPIs and their customized versions in reducing academic achievement gap among female or minority children and youth. Chapter II systematically reviewed forty randomized trials that focused on the effect of values affirmation, role model, growth mindset, and social-belonging interventions on students' academic outcomes. Even though effect sizes greatly varied, majority of the studies indicated the positive impact of interventions on grades, task performance, and psychological outcomes of disadvantaged students attending middle school to college. Findings suggested that BSPIs constitute a promising cost- and outcome-effective way of reducing academic achievement gaps. Chapter III examined if an adapted version of self-affirmation intervention following a multi-threat framework can enhance the mental task performance of female college students under stereotype threat and whether gender group identification moderates the effectiveness of this adapted intervention. In experiment 1, under self-as-target stereotype threat, as expected, students who were exposed to the self-affirmation intervention had the highest task performance. However, under group-as-target stereotype threat, similar performances of the students in both the self-affirmation and group-affirmation conditions compared to control condition were found. In experiment 2, it is shown that the extent a female student was identified with her gender group moderated the effectiveness of the group-affirmation intervention. Results encourage researchers to consider different understandings of self while instituting common stereotype threat interventions rather than taking a uniform approach. Chapter IV investigated the transportability and adaptability of the social belonging intervention that has been shown to increase the sense of belonging of disadvantaged students and, in turn, increase their academic achievement, to the refugee context for the first time. Findings of two randomized experiments with 532 Syrian refugee and Turkish middle-school students showed that the customized social belonging intervention enhanced refugee students' potential to succeed in school, performance state self-esteem and identification with school (in the first experiment) and social belonging in school and school trust (in the second experiment). Results of this study encourage further research to explore effective interventions to ease the academic and related psychological difficulties faced by refugee students.