By Chris Kenrick
Palo Alto Weekly Staff
Why do black students, with equally good SAT scores, end up with worse college GPAs than their white counterparts?
Why do female math majors, going in with performance equal to that of male students, fall behind in advanced classes?
Social psychologist Claude Steele, the new dean of the Stanford University School of Education, shared his findings on those questions in a campus talk Monday (Oct. 31).
Steele has spent much of his career exploring performance anxiety based on perceived negative consequences of stereotypes.
His results shed light on the racial achievement gap. Data from the Palo Alto Unified School District, discussed by the Board of Education last week, showed that only 3 of the 20 African-American students who graduated in 2011 had completed the prerequisites for California's four-year state universities, compared to 80 percent of all district graduates.
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