Improving Judgements of Performance Among Black Engineering Students Highly Susceptible to Stereotype Threat: An Intervention

Stereotype threat (ST) is implicated as a contributory factor to attrition in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. One of the mechanisms by which ST degrades performance is by impairing metacognitive monitoring (Schmader et al. 2008), which is positively related to learning and performance (Hadwin et al., 2017; Winne & Hadwin, 1998, 2008). Several interventions to improve metacognition exist, but to our knowledge, none have evaluated their effectiveness in improving performance outcomes among ST susceptible students who are more likely to suffer situational deficits in metacognitive processing under threat. The present investigation fills this gap in the literature through a brief intervention to improve performance judgments. 25 Black Engineering students participated in a four-week intervention to improve judgments of learning. Results showed that the intervention improved student calibration among Black engineering students susceptible to race-related ST and attenuated the negative relationship between calibration bias and performance. Specifically, study participants underestimated their performance, which was negatively and significantly associated with performance at the onset of the study. However, calibration bias diminished significantly over the intervention and subsequently had no impact on performance at four and six weeks (two weeks post- intervention).