Much Ado About Race

How strongly students identify with their race could affect academic success.

Just six of 10 African-American students nationally graduate from public high schools in four years, compared to eight of 10 white students, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Education. In 2008, the Census Bureau found African-American males nearly twice as likely to drop out of high school as white males.

Many researchers are looking at whether African Americans’ ethnic identity contributes to the achievement gap shown in statistics like these. They define ethnic identity as a psychological component related to a sense of membership and the feelings and attitudes associated with that group. So it’s not just that a student is one race or another—it’s how strongly that student indentifies as a member of that ethnicity.

Some studies have found a strong ethnic identity could impede African-American students’ academic achievement, including one that UT researcher Kevin Cokley conducted at two inner-city Houston high schools.

In that low-income urban setting, he wasn’t surprised to find a negative correlation between ethnic identity and academic success. The environment in which identities are formed makes a big difference, Cokley says, and in that particular one, the youth may have had few examples of African Americans achieving and prioritizing academic success. He took that into consideration, as well as factors like students’ gender and their parents’ educational backgrounds. An associate professor in educational psychology, Cokley cautions against drawing conclusions on a single factor like ethnic identity.

“You can’t make a blanket statement that for all African-American students their racial and ethnic identities are negatively related to their achievement, because that’s simply not the case,” he says. “It depends on their age, where they’re in school, what social environments they’re in. I hope to offer to the academic dialogue a more nuanced understanding of how identity impacts.”

The data from Cokley’s and other studies are hardly conclusive. What he has found in his research to be consistent is the strong relationship between academic performance and academic self-concept, students’ perceptions of their own academic abilities.

A few years ago, he researched students at a historically black university and found ethnic identity to be a positive influence on academic self-concept and therefore academic success. While this was different from what he later found with the high schoolers, Cokley wasn’t surprised. “By the time students get to college,” he says, “their identities are usually pretty oriented toward doing well in school. Otherwise, they most likely wouldn’t be interested in being a college student.”

The question remains how to earlier influence a student’s positive academic self-concept and how strong ethnic ties can impact that. Cokley has hopes that they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In the African American Psychology course he teaches in the College of Education, Cokley and his pupils talk about seeing students’ academic motivation rise as they take African-American studies courses and learn more about their ethnic history.

“These results,” Cokley wrote, “suggest that educators should focus on fostering a strong, positive ethnic identity among African-American students which should include exposure to the many intellectual and academic successes of African Americans.”

Read more about Cokley's research here.