The Role of Gender Identities and Stereotype Salience With the Academic Performance of Male and Female College Athletes

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to examine factors that moderate the experience of academic identity threat among college athletes who represent a stigmatized group on most college campuses (Yopyk & Prentice, 2005). It was hypothesized that because they are more engaged in academics, female college athletes would be especially threatened by the prospect of confirming the “dumb-jock” stereotype. As predicted, female college athletes performed more poorly when their athletic and academic identities were explicitly linked, but only on moderately difficult test items. The results also revealed that male college athletes performed significantly better (see stereotype reactance and self-affirmation) on more difficult test items when only their athletic identity was primed prior to the test. This is an important finding as there is little research on the impact of positive stereotypes on performance. The discussion focuses on the different motivational processes (i.e. self-affirmation) that impact the academic performance of male and female college athletes when aspects of their campus identity are primed within a classroom context.

Who is Whistling Vivaldi? How Black football players engage with stereotype threats in college

“…When compared to similarly engaged White college athletes, Black student-athletes underperformed not only on the difficult test items but also on the easier items (Harrison et al, 2009). These researchers postulated that the critical issue underlying these effects is that threat is more likely to impact performance when targets perceive the task to be challenging.…”

“…One of the crucial tenets of stereotype threat is that targets do not need to interact with a biased individual for negative stereotypes to have a powerful debilitating effect on behavior (Harrison et al, 2009); it can merely be present in the climate of a particular environment, such as college. The increased concern to perform adds an additional psychological burden to the task, thus undermining an individual's ability to operate at their fullest potential.…”

“…Black student-athletes for their identity as a "scholar-athlete" has even led to underperformance on standardized intelligence tests (Harrison et al, 2009;Stone et al, 2012). Interestingly, lower scores on difficult items of a GRE test segment such as verbal reasoning reveal the pervasiveness of stereotype threat into basic constructivist skills, a recognizable indicator of diminished cognitive and emotional resources.…”

Stereotype Threat and the Student‐athlete

“…The items from the GRE are commonly characterized as more difficult (Harrison et al 2009). This assessment amplified the difficulty of the GRE items by adding 9 GRE questions to a 30-question quantitative GRE section that was designed to be taken in 30 minutes by itself.…”

“…The knowledge of this targeted study recruitment may have made the subjects exceptionally susceptible to the threat prime. Similarly, Harrison et al (2009) recruited only student-athletes and informed participants ex ante that the study was designed to improve their classroom performance, possibly allowing identity awareness to be primed in an unnaturally strong manner.…”