期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2019
卷号：116
期号：5
页码：1553-1558
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1808589116
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Educational attainment is one lever that can increase opportunity for economically disadvantaged families—especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). Unfortunately, students from lower-income backgrounds often perform poorly and fail high school STEM courses, which are a necessary step in pursuing fast-growing and lucrative STEM careers, graduating high school, and matriculating to college. We reasoned that, because high school STEM courses often use high-stakes tests to gauge performance, and such tests can be especially stressful for lower-income students, interventions that help students regulate their negative emotions during tests should reduce the achievement gap between higher- and lower-income students. In a large-scale ( n = 1,175) field experiment conducted in ninth grade science classrooms, students were asked to complete a control exercise, or they were given the opportunity to complete an exercise to help them regulate their worries and reinterpret their anxious arousal before their tests. We found significant benefits of emotion regulation activities for lower-income students in terms of their science examination scores, science course passing rate, and students’ attitudes toward examination stress, suggesting that students’ emotions are one factor that impacts performance. For example, 39% of lower-income students failed the course in the control group compared with only 18% of students failing the course if they participated in the emotion regulation interventions—a reduction in course failure rate by half. Our work underscores the crucial importance of targeting students’ emotions during impactful points in their academic trajectories for improving STEM preparedness and enhancing overall academic success.
关键词：academic achievement gaps ; educational interventions ; socioeconomic status ; emotion regulation ; test anxiety
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