Theoretical, Ethical, and Policy Considerations for Conducting Social–Psychological Interventions to Close Educational Achievement Gaps

Abstract

Social-psychological interventions in education have shown remarkable promise as brief, inexpensive, and powerful methods for improving educational equity and inclusion by helping underperforming students realize their potential. These findings have led to intensive study and replication attempts to understand and close achievement gaps at scale. In the present review, we identify several significant issues this work has raised that bear on the theoretical, ethical, and policy implications of using these interventions to close achievement gaps. Using both classic and contemporary models of threat and performance, we propose a Zone Model of Threat to predict when social-psychological interventions in education may yield positive, null, and negative effects for specific students. From this analysis, we argue from an ethical standpoint that to reduce backfire effects, interventions should be focused on optimizing the salience of psychological threat across students rather than on uniformly reducing it. As a long-term policy goal, intervention studies should follow a two-step process, in which students' individual levels of threat are first diagnosed and then interventions are tailored to the students based on their threat levels. Practical and theoretical implications of the proposed framework are discussed.

Tackling Educational Inequalities with Social Psychology: Identities, Contexts, and Interventions

“…However, these psychological barriers depend crucially on the interplay between students' sense of who they are-their social identities-and their daily experience of education-their local educational context, as set out in our Identities in Context model of educational inequalities (see Figure 1). These barriers vary considerably from context to context, and so wise interventions must be implemented with care, to ensure that they are targeted at the particular barriers faced by a given group in a given context, at the same time avoiding harming other groups (Binning & Browman, 2020).…”

“…However, as we shall see, the effectiveness of these interventions varies across contexts and for different groups to the extent that, in some cases, they can be detrimental. To be effective, the interventions must be diligently and competently implemented and completed (Borman, 2017; Borman, Grigg, Rozek, Hanselman, & Dewey, 2018; Easterbrook et al, 2020a), target the appropriate students (Binning & Browman, 2020), and be implemented in contexts that are sensitive and supportive enough to enable, sustain, and reinforce beneficial effects (Cohen, Garcia, & Goyer, 2018; Goyer et al., 2017; Walton & Wilson, 2018; Walton & Yeager, 2020). If they are implemented without these conditions in place, they may fail or even be harmful to some (Binning & Browman, 2020; Borman, 2017).…”

“…To be effective, the interventions must be diligently and competently implemented and completed (Borman, 2017; Borman, Grigg, Rozek, Hanselman, & Dewey, 2018; Easterbrook et al, 2020a), target the appropriate students (Binning & Browman, 2020), and be implemented in contexts that are sensitive and supportive enough to enable, sustain, and reinforce beneficial effects (Cohen, Garcia, & Goyer, 2018; Goyer et al., 2017; Walton & Wilson, 2018; Walton & Yeager, 2020). If they are implemented without these conditions in place, they may fail or even be harmful to some (Binning & Browman, 2020; Borman, 2017). Even when these conditions are seemingly met, null effects can still occur (Borman, 2017; Hanselman, Rozek, Grigg, & Borman, 2017).…”

“…These findings may, in part, be due to variations in the implementation of the interventions (Borman, 2017; Easterbrook et al., 2020a), such as using online rather than written exercises (Bayly & Bumpus, 2020), presenting the exercises as part of an external research study rather than something teachers want the students to complete (Protzko & Aronson, 2016), or because the school did not have a sufficiently supportive environment to sustain the effects (Dee, 2015). But they also suggest the possibility that the students that were targeted by these interventions were underperforming for reasons other than threat or incompatibility (Binning & Browman, 2020). A framework that outlines when such psychological factors are likely to contribute to inequalities in educational outcomes would therefore be a useful tool.…”

“…Yet, such interventions must be used with care since they can be ineffective or even counterproductive to some groups. This can happen if those groups are not affected by psychological factors that dampen their educational performance, or if the interventions are not appropriately designed or effectively implemented in sustaining contexts (Bayly & Bumpus, 2020; Binning & Browman, 2020; Borman, 2017; Walton & Yeager, 2020). It is therefore critical to intervene only in contexts in which psychological factors contribute to educational inequalities, and in which social psychological interventions are likely to be effective, sustained, and unlikely to create unintended negative consequences.…”