Educational Psychology and Psychologists

Since the inception of the field of educational psychology in the early 1900s, researchers have focused on attention, memory, teaching, and learning, and on experimental approaches to these topics. While much of the seminal research in the field has been conducted on European-American subjects, and the literature reflects this focus, interest in African Americans has waxed and waned at various times over the last one hundred years. Key topics of research with regard to African Americans have included the differential performance of blacks and whites on intelligence tests and, more recently, the black-white gap in academic achievement and ways of promoting school success among African-American students.

Early in the last century, in an emerging debate on what was then called "Negro education," scholars argued about the educability of people of African descent, questioning whether they were innately inferior in intelligence. Edward Thorndike, the founder of educational psychology, and his students stressed the importance of educational measurement. Using intelligence (IQ) tests originally developed in France and adapted for U.S. populations, researchers sought to determine intelligence "scientifically." In 1913 A. C. Strong published one of the first studies that purported to show hereditarily determined racial differences in intelligence. This was the beginning of a series of studies that would be used to justify claims of mental inferiority of African Americans.

Horace Mann Bond, an African-American educator and researcher, and other African-American social scientists in the 1920s were instrumental in refuting many of these claims. Bond used findings from intelligence tests administered to white soldiers by the U.S. Army to argue

against racial explanations for differences in intelligence. The median score of white soldiers from four southern states corresponded to the mental age of a twelve-and-a-half-year-old child; northern white soldiers on average scored higher. Such variations within a single racial group showed, according to Bond, that intelligence tests are less a measure of innate ability than a measure of such factors as environment and education.

From the 1930s through the 1960s hereditary explanations for differences in intelligence largely fell out of favor. Psychologists argued that there were intractable problems in the design of intelligence tests, including failure to control for the influence of subjects' economically unequal backgrounds. Moreover, they argued, the meaning of the test scores was debatable. And the validity of race as a scientific category was increasingly coming into question.

Instead, scholarly attention turned to the influence of environment on intelligence. As detailed in recent work by James Banks, the educational and social science theories, concepts, and research of the early 1960s depicted African Americans as culturally deprived. Scholars favoring the cultural deprivation or "culture of poverty" paradigm posited that low-income populations lacked the socialization experiences that would enable them to acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the middle class. Though these skills and attitudes were rarely measured, educational reform driven by this ideology aimed to transform many of the early socialization experiences of "disadvantaged" children. An array of programs such as Head Start were created with this goal in mind.

In 1966, however, Johns Hopkins University sociologist James S. Coleman wrote a landmark report that suggested, among other things, that remedial programs could not effectively combat the "culture of poverty" as long as children returned to culturally deprived homes. Meanwhile, noted geneticists Arthur Jensen and William Shockley turned the discussion once again toward the question of innate differences. In 1969 Jensen published a seminal article in the Harvard Educational Review, arguing that compensatory programs would not work for African Americans because of their supposed deficits in cognitive abilities. Though the scientific merit of his work has been widely debated, Jensen has continued to focus on differences between black and white IQ scores for more than thirty years and has become one of the most cited educational psychologists.

From the 1970s through the 1990s intelligence as measured by standardized tests remained a popular topic in the field of African-American educational psychology. Claims of innate differences in intellect received renewed attention with the 1994 publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Critics of this controversial work argue that IQ tests actually measure subjects' assimilation of white middle-class culture rather than their general abilities. Asa Hilliard, a noted African-American educational psychologist and historian, has argued against the use of IQ tests in general, citing their cultural biases. He contends that the problem of how much an individual can learn is complex and cannot be understood from the perspective of a single subdiscipline of psychology, that is, intelligence testing.

Critics of Jensen's research have also cited the problem of cultural bias in IQ tests. In one study, for example, Jensen compared the performance of black children to that of white children who were younger, in some cases by two or more years. High correlation between the test scores of these two groups served as the basis for his claim that black children lag in cognitive development and that this is likely the result of heritable differences in general ability. African-American psychologist Janet Helms has argued that the developmental lag Jensen apparently found may have been due to differences in acculturation rather than in intellectual ability. That is, white children may learn their own culture two years earlier than black children vicariously learn white culture, which is also the culture of the test.

Understanding the Achievement Gap

Though biological explanations for differences in group performance are now widely rejected, many measures point to a persistent educational achievement gap between African-American and European-American children. In 2001, for example, whites outperformed blacks in math and reading at every grade level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Various explanations have been advanced to account for the apparent discrepancy. In addition to purported differences in innate ability, as noted above, these hypotheses focus on poverty; actions and attitudes of parents and teachers; school-related inadequacies, ranging from differences in resources to inattention to the cognitive styles of African-American youth; an "oppositional culture" among blacks; and discrimination.

Several of these factors are clearly correlated with educational achievement within racial groups as well as between them. Within every American ethnic and racial group, children in higher socioeconomic brackets score better on standardized tests than children in lower brackets, and they are more likely to finish high school and attend college. Socioeconomic status has been shown to be an important predictor of differences in academic achievement among African-American children, with black children from poor backgrounds performing less well on average than those from more affluent backgrounds. The question that has not yet been clearly resolved by research, with adequate controls for different factors, is the extent to which socioeconomic differences account for the observed differences between racial groups. High expectations in parents and teachers also have been positively related to children's achievement, both in the general population and among black children in particular. Moreover, when African-American parents are involved in schools, such as by volunteering in the classroom, their children's academic skills and achievement improve.

African-American educational psychologists Barbara Shade, Wade Boykin, and Janice Hale attribute differences in black-white achievement in part to group differences in cognitive or learning styles (subsumed in the category "behavioral style" in the work of Hilliard). They argue that cognitive style accounts for group differences in a variety of cognitive, perceptual, and personality variables, which in turn influence the ways in which individuals perceive, organize, and interpret information. Scholars have noted, however, that important variations in cognitive style exist within the African-American population. For example, while some research suggests that African Americans typically exhibit "field dependence," tending to perceive things in relation to other objects in a given domain, it is clear that some blacks exhibit high levels of "field independence," tending to perceive things analytically and in isolation. Such intragroup differences have cast doubt on the claim that groups have particular cognitive styles. Some scholars believe that group differences in cognitive styles do exist in a broad sense but that class background may contribute to differences within groups.

John Ogbu, a Nigerian-born anthropologist, offers an alternative explanation for the gap in achievement. Since the slavery era, he contends, African Americans have developed a culture in opposition to that of whites. African-American students' low performance, according to this hypothesis, reflects their perception of academic achievement as "acting white."

One of the first scholars to examine social aspects of the schooling experiences of black children was Inez Beverly Prosser. The first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in educational psychology, she received her degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1933. Her dissertation, "The Non-Academic Development of Negro Children in Mixed and Segregated Schools," showed, although with modest results, that children in segregated schools fared better than those in mixed schools as measured by several social and personality variables, including introversion and extraversion.

In 1939 prominent African-American psychologist Kenneth Clark, along with his wife Mamie Clark, began a series of studies of African-American preschool and elementary school children in segregated, semi-segregated, and integrated groups. Among the instruments used were white and black dolls, identical except for skin color. When asked to "show me the doll that you like best," the black children displayed consistent preference for the white dolls, leading the Clarks to conclude that the children were developing a negative self-image and that segregation was taking a psychological toll. Kenneth Clark's testimony was influential in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 that found racially segregated schooling unconstitutional.

Both the Prosser and Clark studies foreshadowed more recent research that cites discrimination as an important factor that hinders the cognitive performance of African-American children. Claude Steele and his colleagues have argued that both socioeconomic status and genetic differences are insufficient explanations for underachievement by African-American children. Instead, they emphasize the role of negative stereotypes. According to this view, African Americans bear a psychological burden caused by society's stereotypes of black inferiority in achievement domains, and they may feel threatened by the risk of confirming these stereotypes. If this "stereotype threat" is strong enough, it interferes with social interaction and intellectual performance and can even lead to decisions to withdraw from participation in certain domains.

Promoting Black Children's School Success

It is clear from the literature that no single factor causes the gap in academic achievement. In an effort to explore the myriad contextual factors that can lead to successful cognitive development, educational psychologists have begun to study specific cases of excellence in teaching and learning that have fostered academic success among African-American children.

One of the most noted ethnographic case studies is that of African-American educator Gloria Ladson-Billings, who looked at effective teaching in an African-American community. Based on her observations, Ladson-Billings contends that teachers can promote academic success for African-American children by adopting culturally relevant pedagogical strategies. These include (a) allowing students to be apprenticed into a learning community rather than studying subject matter in isolation; (b) allowing students' real-life experiences to become "official" curriculum; (c) broadening the concept of literacy to incorporate both literature and oratory; (d) treating students as competent; (e) providing instruction that helps students move from what they already know to what they need to know; (f) extending students' thinking and abilities by first assessing their initial knowledge of the subject matter, and (g) having in-depth knowledge of their students and subject matter.

The literature on effective schooling for all racial groups has underscored the importance of strong leadership, accountability, academic focus, and orderliness. These and other school-related factors have been associated with high achievement among African American students. A case study of Providence–St. Mel, an independent, all-black school in Chicago, details the factors that have led to a one hundred percent college admission rate at the school. They include high expectations, praise, cooperative learning, caring teachers, tangible rewards, and extensive test preparation. School success or failure is attributed to a student's level of effort rather than to innate ability. The school encourages its students to envision constructive identities for themselves—as doctors, for example—and to learn about and take pride in their African-American heritage.

Early childhood educator Janice Hale, in Learning While Black, argues that promotion of academic success for African-American children requires building an infrastructure for educational accountability like those often created by parents in schools serving white middle-class students. Drawing on thirty years of experience working with schools that mainly serve black children, as well as on her own son's schooling experience, she calls for creation of a school culture in which every child is treated as part of a family. The school in turn must be part of a larger community in which concerned citizens are engaged to support families and the mission of the schools.

See also Education; Ogbu, John; Social Psychology, Psychologists, and Race

Bibliography

Berliner, David C. "The 100-Year Journey of Educational Psychology: From Interest, to Disdain, to Respect for Practice." In Exploring Applied Psychology: Origins and Critical Analyses, edited by Thomas K. Fagan and Gary R. VandenBos. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1993.

Bond, Horace Mann. "What the Army 'Intelligence' Tests Measured." Opportunity 2 (1924): 197–202.

Graham, Sandra. "Most of the Subjects Were White and Middle Class: Trends in Published Research on African Americans in Selected APA Journals, 1970–1989." American Psychologist 47, no. 5 (May 1992): 629–639.

Hale, Janice. Learning While Black: Creating Educational Excellence for African American Children. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Hilliard, Asa G., III. "Either a Paradigm Shift or No Mental Measurement: The Nonscience and Nonsense of the Bell Curve." Cultural Diversity and Mental Health 2, no. 1 (1996): 1–20.

Jensen, Arthur. "How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?" Harvard Educational Review 39 (February 1969): 1–123.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994.

Lee, Carol D., and Diana Slaughter-Defoe. "Historical and Sociocultural Influences on African American Education." In Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, edited by James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.

Ogbu, John. "Collective Identity and the Burden of 'Acting White' in Black History, Community, and Education." Urban Review 36, no. 1 (2004): 1–35.

Pressley, Michael, Lisa Raphael, J. David Gallagher, and Jeannette DiBella. "Providence–St. Mel School: How a School That Works for African American Students Works." Journal of Educational Psychology 96, no. 2 (2004): 216–235.

Winston, Andrew, ed. Defining Difference: Race and Racism in the History of Psychology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2004.

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