Some educational interventions aimed at improving student-teacher relations (or working off of the contact hypothesis) may be more effective if the differences between the student and the teacher is more pronounced. This potentially works in reverse as well; the more related a teacher already is to the target population, the less effective it becomes in comparison.
- A White teacher given a relatedness intervention may greatly improve the performance of low-achieving African-American/Hispanic students, but may have no beneficial effect for low-achieving White/Asian students.

Intervention Relatedness

While socio-cognitive interventions are often developed and handled in a way similar to clinical trials, the actual "patient response" and data taking methods are nowhere near exhaustive enough in comparison. The previously stated confounding variables are often not well addressed, or event recorded.

Deeper Investigation / Qualitative Measures

It is possible that high-achieving students have more tools and strategies for overcoming academic challenges, thus giving them a better chance at overcoming hardships. This, in turn, helps keep them motivated and focused on the task at hand, allowing them perform better and be exposed to even more resource. The same is suggested to be true, but in reverse for low-achieving students.
- An analogy is drawn to riding a bike; it is far easier to maintain momentum and speed up while a bike is in motion, but significantly harder if the bike is at a standstill. Continuing with the analogy, bumps and other obstructions make things more difficult for a stopped bike than a moving one.

Achievement Momentum Speculation

A variety of socio-economical variables may not be properly taken into consideration, or accounted for in intervention based studies. More specifically, these variables affect both the teacher, the target student population, and the surrounding/incidental student population. These variables may be:
- Ethnicity
- Gender
- Location

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The achievement gap is a persistent disparity in academic outcomes, such as grades, test scores, and graduation rates, observed among students from different demographic groups. These groups are often defined by ethnicity, race, and, in certain subjects, gender.

Definition of the Achievement Gap in Education

Schwarts, D.L., Cheng, K.M., Salehi, S., Wieman. The Half Empty Question for Socio-Cognitive Interventions. (2016). Journal of Educational Psychology. 108(3), 397-404.

The Half Empty Question for Socio-Cognitive Interventions.

Confounding Effects in Intervention Studies

Käser, T., Hallinen, N. R., &amp; Schwartz, D. L. (2017). Modeling exploration strategies to predict student performance within a learning environment and beyond. Proceedings of the Seventh International Learning Analytics &amp; Knowledge Conference. doi:10.1145/3027385.3027422

Modeling Exploration Strategies to Predict Student
Performance within a Learning Environment and Beyond

This study examined whether having African-American student (seventh to eighth grade), write essays affirming their personal values, improves their academic performance. These subtle interventions would lessen minority students' psychological threat related to being negatively sterotyped in school. 
Ending results show that over 2 years, the grade point average of African Americans was on average, raised by .24 grade points, and those who were low-achieving, benefited the most, improving their average .41 points. 

Recursive Processes in Self-Affirmation: Intervening to Close the Minority Achievement Gap 

This paper looks at the problematic trend of students that come from underrepresented minorities (URM) or are a first-generation college student (FG) who tend to give up on courses of science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM). It then goes on to explain not only the factors that lead to a lack of motivation in succeeding in these classes but potential interventions that could mitigate these problems, leading to success. The research study discussed in this article looks at how these interventions are used in a biology course with students of various backgrounds (minority, majority, first-generation or not, and combinations of both racial and social backgrounds) to see what the results are (in the form of class grades) from using the interventions to address lack of motivation.

Closing Gaps with A Utility-Value Intervention: Disentangling Race and Social Class

- "Reducing the Racial Achievement Gap: A Social-Psychological Intervention" by Geoffrey L Cohen, Nancy Apfel, Julio Garcia, and Allison Master (2006)
- "Modeling Exploration Strategies to Predict Student Performance within a Learning Environment and Beyond" by Käser, T., Hallinen, N. R., & Schwartz, D. L. (2017)
- Matthew Effects in Education and Culture. The Matthew effect: How advantage begets further advantage. by Rigney, D. (2010). 
- "The Achievement Gap and the Discipline Gap: Two Sides of the Same Coin?" by Gregory, Anne & Skiba, Russell & Noguera, Pedro (2010)
- "Latino English Language Learners: Bridging Achievement and Cultural Gaps Between Schools and Families." by Good, M. E., Masewicz, S., & Vogel, L. (2010). 
- "Multicultural Education." Great School Partnership. (2013)
- A diversity ideology intervention: Multiculturalism reduces the racial achievement gap. by Birnbaum, H. J., Stephens, N. M., Townsend, S. S., & Hamedani, M. G. (2020). 
- "Reducing the Gender Achievement Gap in College Science: A Classroom Study of Values Affirmation" by Miyake, A., Kost-Smith, L.E., Finkelstein, N.D., Pollock, S.J., Cohen, G.L.,
- Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
- Outliers by Malcom Gladwell
-  Experiences and Outcomes of First-Generation Students in Community Colleges by Pascarella et. al 
-  Closing the Social-Class Achievement Gap: A Difference-Education Intervention Improves First-Generation Students’ Academic Performance and All Students’ College Transition by Stephens et. al 
-  Speed and Studying: Gendered Pathways to Success by Iman YeckehZaare and Paul Resnick

Achievement Gap References

The goal of this study is to improve minority students' performance and to better understand how psychological threats can undermine self-integrity, leading to poor academic performance. Researchers tested whether psychological threats can be lessened by reaffirming self-integrity, thus improving academic performance amongst negatively stereotyped minority students. 

Reducing the Racial Achievement Gap: A Social-Psychological Intervention- Goals of Study

Doris B. Chin, Kristen P. Blair, Rachel C. Wolf, Luke D. Conlin, Maria Cutumisu, Jay Pfaffman & Daniel L. Schwartz (2019) Educating and Measuring Choice: A Test of the Transfer of Design Thinking in Problem Solving and Learning, Journal of the Learning Sciences, 28:3, 337-380, DOI: 10.1080/10508406.2019.1570933

Educating and Measuring Choice: A Test of the Transfer of Design Thinking in Problem Solving and Learning

- Race
- Gender
- Income
- Language
- Disability
- Parent Education Level
- Nationality
- Technology
- Traditional
- Cultural differences
- The Impact of Coronavirus

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