Priming for Success
QUESTION: Is it possible for teacher leaders to prime their students for success?
John Bargh, an New York University professor and psychologist created a group of experiments called “priming experiments.” He was especially interested in “The link between stereotype activation and then behaving in line with the content of that stereotype.”
Unconscious Effect
In one experiment subjects were asked to construct sentences from jumbled words like the groups below:
him was worried she always
from are Florida oranges temperature
shoes give repair old the
us bingo sing play let
Scattered throughout the groupings were words related to aging such as “worried,” “Florida,” “old,” and “bingo.” The researcher discovered that the subjects left the room and walked down the hall more slowly than when they arrived. They had been unconsciously affected by “priming” that caused them to act as if they were old.
Aggression versus Patience
In a second priming experiment, one group of subjects worked their way through a scramble test that included words related to aggressive behavior while another group of subjects worked with words related to tolerance and patience. Both groups of subjects were then asked to walk down the hall to talk with an administrator. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the administrator was scripted to be busy with another activity that left the subject waiting for 10 minutes or until the subject interrupted. The group “primed” for aggression interrupted after about five minutes while 82% of the group “primed” for patience never interrupted during the entire 10 minutes---and these were New Yorkers!
A Smarter Frame of Mind
In a third priming experiment conducted by Dutch researchers, two groups of students were asked to answer Trivial Pursuit questions. The only difference between the two groups was that one was given the direction and time to “think like a professor” before being asked the questions. The “professor” group answered 55.6% correctly while the non-primed group answered 42.6% correctly. The more successful subjects were not more focused, not more prepared, or more serious, they were simply in a smarter frame of mind. Thinking like a teacher, this difference looks like more than a letter grade difference! Wouldn’t you like to prime your students so they are in a smarter frame of mind?
Minority Achievement
Psychologist Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson applied the priming concept to a shocking experiment involving black college students and questions from the Graduate Record Examination used for entrance into graduate school. The mere act of having to identify their race on pretest questions primed the target group of students with such negative stereotypes of African American students and academic achievement that they got only half as many questions correct as the control group. When asked afterwards, the lower performing, “primed” students were not aware of anything that affected their performance. Furthermore, when asked if the race question bothered them, they typically responded that they didn’t think they were smart enough to be in higher education.
A Personal Story
During my first year teaching, I was saddled with the “Freshman Class from Hell.” Although I tried many different approaches to affect both their academic and social progress, I was convinced by the Christmas break that one strategy was having no effect. Every day I would arrive early and place a motivating quotation on the blackboard, high up in the right had corner. I never referred to it and, surprisingly I thought, none of them ever mentioned it either. When I came back the first day from the Christmas break, I didn’t bother putting up a quote. It was a lot of work to find the quotes, decide which ones couldn’t be twisted into a sexual connotation, and then to keep track of which ones I had used so I wouldn’t repeat them. So … I quit.
From the moment the first freshman entered the classroom until the bell rang when they returned to class that first day after Christmas, they were in an uproar. “Hey, where did the quote go?” “Why isn’t there that thing up on the board?” I don’t really know what effect the quotes had on them but they had been carefully chosen to be uplifting. They addressed issues of greatness, positive character, and possibilities. I gladly returned to my practice of posting daily quotes with the confidence that they were being read and meant something to the students. Was I priming them? Probably.
The material above is drawn from Malcolm Gladwell’s insightful book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
Other thoughts about planning and success
posted by James Hall at 1:39 PM
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