Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers

Small sample; 20 question test - so don't get too excited.

However hopeful, this is a long way from fact. This is just another example of a study that should have been kept on the shelf until the peer-review was completed. Hyping an unconfirmed study doesn't really help.

Now I have no doubt that the election of President Obama will bring a new sense of possibilities to countless African American students. But it won't happen simply because Obama was inagurated. It will happen over time, after lots of hard work, with an increasing number of black students confirming that proficiency is possible for all but the most severely disabled students.

This from the New York Times:

Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance.

Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”

The study has not yet undergone peer review, and two academics who read it on Thursday said they would be interested to see if other researchers would be able to replicate its results.

Dr. Friedman and his fellow researchers, David M. Marx, a professor of social psychology at San Diego State University, and Sei Jin Ko, a visiting professor in management and organizations at Northwestern, have submitted their study for review to The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Dr. Friedman said....