

Simple psychological intervention boosts school performance of ethnic minority students - tokenadult
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/04/simple-psychological-intervention.html

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patio11
"Stereotype threat", the proposed mechanism for this "intervention"
functioning, is not reliably reproducible in experimentation.

Also, _come on_ \-- a ten minute lesson repeated three times adds half a grade
level two years later? What kind of fairy dust were you sprinkling during that
lesson? I'd like some -- you can probably cure cancer by sprinkling it on
someone eating a carrot and stop the Israel/Palestine if you sprinkle it on a
Palestinian and Israeli forced to watch The Odd Couple.

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tokenadult
You are correct of course that the usual questions about any published
research result apply.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

Maybe this result will not be replicated, as many first results are not. But
the question presented by this paper is not so much what the mechanism of the
problem is, but whether or not the intervention is helpful to the learners.
The place of first publication being Science,

<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/324/5925/400>

the most selective journal of all, is a good sign, and it certainly looks to
me like this issue is worthy of further investigation, especially as it is
consistent with other recent findings in positive psychology and possibly
generalizable to how hackers running start-ups can maintain their relentless
resourcefulness.

