Brown Bag Seminar: A Question of Belonging: A Social-Psychological Approach to Understanding and Remedying Group Disparities in School Achievement

The persistence of large ethnic and gender group differences in academic achievement remains a significant problem in education. This presentation will focus on the role of social-psychological processes in contributing to group differences in achievement, highlighting especially concerns about social-belonging that arise when people work in settings in which their group is negatively stereotyped or underrepresented. It will review several brief interventions designed to buttress students' sense of belonging in school—lasting an hour or less—and discuss effects on African American college students' grades over several years, women's achievement in engineering, and African American adolescents' attitudes, achievement, and disciplinary outcomes. The implications of brief social-psychological interventions for efforts to reduce achievement gaps at scale will be discussed.

A professor of psychology at Stanford University, Greg Walton is committed to identifying psychological processes that contribute to social problems and to developing theory-based interventions to affect these processes. His research examines diverse contexts, including education, health, intergroup relations, politics, and the environment using both laboratory and field-experimentation. This research simultaneously advances psychological theory, demonstrates the importance of psychological processes in major social problems, and suggests novel remedies to these problems.