Last year the Provost of Stanford assembled a small group of psychologists and education researchers, and gave us the mandate of implementing effective strategies to help reduce existing achievement gaps in post secondary institutions.
The initiative that we are currently working on is designed to help minority students and students from low- and middle-income families more effectively take advantage of essential financial resources (e.g., FAFSA) necessary for accessing a postsecondary education. Research has consistently demonstrated that the current achievement gap in postsecondary institutions is due, in part, to systemic barriers that disproportionately affect minority and low-income students. Sometimes these barriers are psychological in nature, and thus have a greater potential of being remedied. For instance, low-income students might actually be less likely to apply for financial aid because of the stigma associated with being poor–low-income students might worry about confirming their status as a low-income if they were to apply for financial aid. In addition, low-income or first-generation students might be experiencing scarcity of time or may have limited access knowledgeable family and friends who can help guide them through the complex application process in a timely fashion.
In our work, we have devised a series of simple strategies to help overcome these two obstacles. The first barrier, which is the motivational disengagement that comes from being worried about the stigma of poverty, is addressed through a self-affirmation intervention (e.g., see Cohen et al., 2006). Studies have shown that brief (about 5 to 15 minute) reflection exercises that get students to reflect on the broader range of values that are important to their identity has the positive effect of buffering against threat or stress. As such, affirmed students would not be as vulnerable to the threat of being branded as low-income. The second barrier, which has to do with the responses that people have in the face of a difficult or complex task, is addressed by systematically breaking down larger complex tasks into smaller and more manageable sub-tasks with specific deadlines. This form of task simplification (or channel factors) have consistently shown more successful task completion for complex tasks (e.g.., Levanthal, Singer, & Jones, 1965; Bettinger, 2012).
Although both of these strategies have long been established and proven to be effective, what is novel about the proposed project is the delivery of this combined content through modern delivery channels. In particular, we have developed a mobile-phone app that can be programed to deliver key messages and information to students who are thinking about completing complex goals. In today’s technologically driven society, we know that the vast majority of people (especially young adults) now own and carry a smartphone with them nearly all the time. In one recent study, it was found that most people carry their phones on them nearly 95% of their waking hours. Utilizing the ubiquitous access to an efficient content-delivery system, we believe that our intervention will help increase the chances of students completing complex on their own in a timely fashion. For instance, a student who is facing a FAFSA deadline in three months will be reminded to work on each of the relevant subtasks in short intervals, making each subtask manageable and outlined with clear timelines.
We also believe that this technology has the potential to help students more effectively complete complex tasks in other domains. For instance, the same factors that affect financial aid application rates among low-income and first-generation students also affects the actual collage application process. Therefore, our proposed project can also be applied to help motivate and guide students to more effectively complete college applications by doing so in a timely fashion and well-informed fashion.
For this work, we were recently awarded funding from the
Lumina Foundation to implement this intervention on a student sample of around 2000 students in the Bay Area. We are looking for schools that have the student composition that we think holds the greatest potential for impact for a program such as this: student composition including minority groups that come from low- or middle-income families. We are also interested in partnering with schools who share our mission to understand and alleviate the factors leading to the widespread achievement gap.
You can find the full report
here.
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on Friday, May 23rd, 2014 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Increasing College Admission Rates among Bay Area High Schools.
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