Tapping interdependent motivation shrinks racial achievement gaps in schools

Closing racial achievement gaps is becoming increasingly important as K-12 schools in the United States become more diverse. Culturally inclusive learning environments can improve outcomes for students from marginalized racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, studies have shown. But it’s unclear what practices make schools more culturally inclusive and how to foster those practices over the long term. 

Now, researchers from the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, the American Institutes for Research, and Northwestern University have shown that a cost-efficient intervention shrank the racial achievement gap in math and boosted students’ psychosocial well-being in a school district serving mainly Hispanic/Latino and White students. The research was published June 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

At the heart of the intervention is a theoretical framework called independent and interdependent cultural models. Co-author Hazel Rose Markus, the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences in H&S and a professor of psychology, has been developing these models with colleagues in the field of cultural psychology since the 1990s. According to Markus, motivation in the independence model focuses on expressing one’s unique preferences, goals, and skills. This tends to play a bigger role for college-educated, middle-class, and more affluent White people living in the U.S. In contrast, motivation in the interdependence model tends to focus on making and maintaining relationships and enhancing the well being of one’s family and community. This often plays an especially important motivational role for people from marginalized racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.              

Both models are valuable, but U.S. schools focus much more on developing students as independent individuals than on developing their sense of communal responsibility. 

“We’re introducing an idea developed in cultural psychology about what motivates people, which we think could be extremely important in communicating to students that they are understood and valued at school,” Markus said. 

This study is the first to attempt to create sustainable change in a school district by focusing on student motivational models and then to measure the effects on student academic performance and emotional well-being. 

How training educational leaders helps students

The project began in 2017 when the superintendent of a small school district in Oregon initiated a partnership with senior author Stephanie Fryberg to reduce the achievement gap between its White and Hispanic/Latino students. The district’s student population was predominantly Hispanic/Latino (54%) and White (41%), and just over a third were English language learners. 

The research team included Markus; Fryberg, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University who studied under Markus; and Laura Brady, lead author and a senior researcher at the American Institutes for Research who studied under Fryberg. 

They developed a 5-day professional development program for the school district that focused on helping educators understand and apply interdependent motivational models in the classroom. Approximately 50 leaders from the school district participated. They were encouraged to share content with their colleagues throughout the academic year. Three hundred teachers received such training and, in turn, taught some 3,400 of the district’s 6,000 students.                            

Some schools added interdependent values, such as responsibility and respect, to the list of values they celebrated each month. Several schools created more opportunities for students to work together as partners or in groups. In one classroom, the teacher celebrated students’ relationships with their families by asking students to work with their relatives to decorate a paper feather describing their families’ values. Students brought their feathers to school and arranged them into a collective nest.                                 

“Teachers want to make a difference in students’ lives, so they’re eager to try some new ideas and practices that could possibly help motivate their students,” Markus said.

The results of the study illustrated the intervention’s impact on academic performance. Controlling for gender and socioeconomic status, the researchers found that students performed better on state math tests when their teachers used more interdependent practices. Several years in, minority students had matched their White peers’ performance in math. 

The achievement gap decreased in language arts test scores, but those changes did not reach statistical significance. The researchers suspect it may take longer to remedy early setbacks in language skills, particularly for students who don’t speak English at home. 

With more teacher support for interdependence came more student trust in teachers and more motivation to succeed. This was true for both White and racial/ethnic minority students. 

“Student achievement is important because it determines opportunities,” Brady said. “But I value the effects that we saw in terms of students’ experiences at school just as much, if not more, because those experiences lay the groundwork for all kinds of achievement.”                     

A blueprint for change 

Partnerships like this one that pair researchers with practitioners represent a preferred method for Stanford’s behavioral science “do tank” known as SPARQ, which seeks to apply social science insights through evidence-backed policies and programs.

“No matter how long you’ve thought about these things and talked to people as a researcher, you still need to be in partnership with the people who are on the ground doing the work, who understand what goes on,” said Markus, who is a faculty co-director of SPARQ with Jennifer Eberhardt, the William R. Kimball Professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and professor of psychology. 

The researchers trained a small group of leaders, who spurred sustainable, district-wide change. This meant a large return on investment. These factors suggest that the approach might work to create lasting change in other districts that prioritize equity work. 

Supporting interdependent as well as independent models of motivation and success might even advance equity beyond the schoolhouse doors, Markus said. 

“The inclusion of ideas and practices of interdependence could improve not just education, but also economic policies, media, technology, and health,” she said. “Wherever you’re looking, it’s clear we need to understand interdependence better. As we are becoming a more diverse country, I think it’s getting easier for people to understand why.”

Acknowledgements

Additional Stanford co-authors include Camilla Griffiths, a research scientist at SPARQ, and psychology graduate student Jenny Yang. Cong Wang, a research associate at Northwestern University was also a co-author. This study was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant 2013753).