Tuesday, November 16, 2010

High GPA African American Adolescents Do Not Feel Accepted

From "Social costs of achievement vary by race/ethnicity, school features" on ScienceBlog:
“This is the first study to clearly show that for adolescents, there are measurable differences in the social costs of academic success across racial and ethnic groups,” notes Thomas E. Fuller-Rowell, postdoctoral research fellow in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan; Fuller-Rowell led the study when he was at Cornell. “By doing so, it points to the significance of race and ethnicity in understanding the achievement gap, and can be helpful to those developing programs and policies to address this gap.”

The researchers carried out their work using a nationally representative sample of almost 14,000 7th through 12th graders,....
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The researchers found that for African American and Native American teenagers, the higher their GPAs at the start of the study, the more their feelings of social acceptance decreased over the one-year period. In contrast, for White teens and teens of other races and ethnicities, the higher their GPAs at the start of the research, the more their feelings of being socially accepted increased over the year.
An ungated pre-publication version of the research paper, "The social costs of academic success across ethnic groups" by Thomas E. Fuller-Rowell and Stacey N. Doan is available here.

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