Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide.

Abstract

Three double-blind randomized field experiments examined the effects of a strategy to restore trust on minority adolescents' responses to critical feedback. In Studies 1 and 2, 7th-grade students received critical feedback from their teacher that, in the treatment condition, was designed to assuage mistrust by emphasizing the teacher's high standards and belief that the student was capable of meeting those standards--a strategy known as wise feedback. Wise feedback increased students' likelihood of submitting a revision of an essay (Study 1) and improved the quality of their final drafts (Study 2). Effects were generally stronger among African American students than among White students, and particularly strong among African Americans who felt more mistrusting of school. Indeed, among this latter group of students, the 2-year decline in trust evident in the control condition was, in the wise feedback condition, halted. Study 3, undertaken in a low-income public high school, used attributional retraining to teach students to attribute critical feedback in school to their teachers' high standards and belief in their potential. It raised African Americans' grades, reducing the achievement gap. Discussion centers on the roles of trust and recursive social processes in adolescent development.

Teaching a lay theory before college narrows achievement gaps at scale

“…Preparatory interventions have a special importance because they provide students a first lens for making sense of events they later experience. However, how a professor introduces difficult course material, provides critical feedback, or responds to a struggling student; how a dean welcomes the entering class; and how a university frames an academic probation letter, among many other events, can have independent effects (27,28). These all represent opportunities to improve the psychological environment of college and thus student success.…”

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Nudging in education

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Brief intervention to encourage empathic discipline cuts suspension rates in half among adolescents

“…This representation of the exercise and interactive elements draws on other successful social-psychological interventions (17)(18)(19)(20). Teachers were treated as experts and agents of positive change for others, not as recipients of remediation.…”