Stereotypes can affect athletes' academic performance (features Thomas Dee)

The academic stigma associated with being a student-athlete can lead to underperformance in the classroom, according to a study by Stanford researcher Thomas Dee

Thomas Dee, a professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, writes in a new study that the academic stigma associated with being a student-athlete can lead to underperformance in the classroom, particularly for males.

Through a controlled experiment at an East Coast college, Dee's research examined "stereotype threats" for college athletes. A stereotype threat occurs when individuals experience reduced performance after becoming anxious about how they're possibly viewed by others.

For example, if a student-athlete believes he or she is looked at as a "dumb jock," that anxiety may become self-fulfilling. In Dee's research, student-athletes who were reminded of their jock identities scored about 12 percent lower on Graduate Record Examination (GRE)-style tests, relative to nonathletes.

Gender differences exist, too. The decreases on test results for males were more than twice as large than that of females.

Underperforming due to this anxiety could lead student-athletes to believe they don't belong in college as students. Dee points out that the stereotype threat has been studied extensively in the context of race and gender.

Read the full story in Phys.org.

Read Thomas Dee's study “Stereotype threat and the student-athlete.”

Watch a video with Deborah Stipek, Claude Steele, Carol Dweck and Geoff Cohen of their panel discussion, “identity, motivation and stereotype threat.”