The Impact of Stereotypes on Teens at Point Loma High School

The Impact of Stereotypes on Teens at PLHS

1.)Stereotypes and racism have always been an issue in this and many other societies.Teenagers are commonly the most impacted by stereotypes, not unlike most teens at Point Loma High School. To further analyze this, my class read “How a Self-Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance” by Shankar Vedantam, a science correspondent for NPR. In his informative article, Vedantam discusses how research proves that self-fulfilling stereotypes can drag down many individuals’ performance. He supports his claim by presenting statistics such as “When black people and white people answered 10 vocabulary questions posed by a white interviewer, blacks on average answered 5.49 questions correctly and whites answered 6.33 correctly”, and talking about how black students tend to score better on tests that are administered by other blacks, and finally explaining how all students’ performance increases when they are not reminded of their race/gender before beginning a test. Vedantam’s purpose is to inform the audience about the negatives of reminding students of their race before a test in an effort to prevent poor performance and boost test scores. Upon reading this, my class has decided to carry out a research project about the stereotypes at our school, and how they affect a variety of students.

2.) We began our study by interviewing a classmate, then interviewing another PLHS student for homework and recording our data. We then proceeded to fill out a Google form, which aided us in planting the anonymous data in a data table and combining it. Following that, we sorted and graphed the data by gender and ethnicity to see how different groups responded to each inquiry. Upon doing th...

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...In my opinion, it’s as simple as attempting to avoid judging another individual at first glance or categorizing them into a certain stereotype or group. Removing the part of the test where the students have to bubble in their race would also serve as a beneficial gesture. I am certain that this society has done almost everything that is reasonable to prevent the growing stereotypes and racism, and the rest depends on the individuals. If one person stopped judging others based on stereotypes, then others would gradually begin to do so as well. It doesn’t sound like much, but overall, this can truly make a difference. Also, I believe that we should accept the fact that there is no such thing as immaculate perception, and work on improving ourselves, our perception of this world and how we view and analyze other human beings.

Works Cited

Shanka vedentam, Jerry Kong