Can Short Psychological Interventions Affect Educational Performance? Revisiting the Effect of Self-Affirmation Interventions

Large amounts of resources are spent annually to improve educational achievement and to close the gender gap in sciences with typically very modest effects. In 2010, a 15-min self-affirmation intervention showed a dramatic reduction in this gender gap. We reanalyzed the original data and found sever...

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Veröffentlicht in:Psychological science Jg. 31; H. 7; S. 865 - 872
Hauptverfasser: Serra-Garcia, Marta, Hansen, Karsten T., Gneezy, Uri
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.07.2020
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Schlagworte:
Academic achievement
Academic Performance
Affirmation
Education
Educational attainment
Educational Status
Female
Gender
Humans
Intervention
Learning outcomes
Male
Psychosocial Intervention - methods
Regression Analysis
Self Concept
Selfaffirmation
Sex Factors
Specification
Women
education
gender gap
self-affirmation
open data
ISSN:0956-7976, 1467-9280, 1467-9280
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Zusammenfassung:Large amounts of resources are spent annually to improve educational achievement and to close the gender gap in sciences with typically very modest effects. In 2010, a 15-min self-affirmation intervention showed a dramatic reduction in this gender gap. We reanalyzed the original data and found several critical problems. First, the self-affirmation hypothesis stated that women’s performance would improve. However, the data showed no improvement for women. There was an interaction effect between self-affirmation and gender caused by a negative effect on men’s performance. Second, the findings were based on covariate-adjusted interaction effects, which imply that self-affirmation reduced the gender gap only for the small sample of men and women who did not differ in the covariates. Third, specification-curve analyses with more than 1,500 possible specifications showed that less than one quarter yielded significant interaction effects and less than 3% showed significant improvements among women.
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SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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ISSN:0956-7976
1467-9280
1467-9280
DOI:10.1177/0956797620923587