- ANOVA between cohorts revealed that there was a significant increase in number of ECTS credits earned in both male majority students and male minority students.
- There was no significant increase in ECTS credits for either female majority students or female minority students.

Barnard College

- The results showed significant improvement in post-intervention groups normally disadvantaged in the achievement gap, while the performance of groups normally benefitting from the achievement gap did not significantly change, implying that the achievement gap was effectively closed by this intervention.
- The increase in percentages of academic performance and retention rate ranged from 5 to 34% for number of credits earned and from 10 to 54% for retention rate.

Goal-setting intervention for the ethnic minority achievement gap: Results

Goal-setting intervention for the gender achievement gap: results

Schippers M C, Scheepers W A and Peterson J B (2015) A scalable goal-setting intervention closes both the gender and ethnic minority achievement gap. Palgrave Communications. 1:15014 doi: 10.1057/palcomms.2015.14.

A scalable goal-setting intervention closes both the gender and ethnic minority achievement gap

- Between cohorts, χ2 analysis with retention (percentage of cohort) as the dependent variable revealed that retention rate was significantly increased for the male majority students.
- There was no significant increase for the female majority students.
- Within the cohorts, retention rate differences between the pre-intervention groups were significant, however, the differences in the intervention cohort were reduced below statistical significance.

Goal-setting intervention results: Retention rate

Goal-setting intervention results: Academic achievement

- Within the cohorts, separate univariate ANOVA revealed that
the intervention reduced or virtually eliminated many of the academic achievement differences evident in the subgroups within the control cohorts. In the control cohorts, there were significant main effects of gender.
- The gender effect was no longer significant in the intervention cohort 

Goal-setting intervention for the ethnic minority achievement gap results: Academic achievement

- The retention in the control cohorts, after 1 year, differed by 16.1 percentage points. In the intervention cohort, by contrast, the difference was 10.0 percentage points, a reduction of the ethnicity gap by 37.88%. After 2 years, in the control cohorts, retention rates differed by 16.4 percentage points. After 2 years, retention in the intervention cohort differed by 10.7 percentage points a reduction of 34.75%.
- The goal-setting intervention therefore appears to have closed the ethnicity gap by approximately 38% in both retention and number of credits earned after 1 year. The ethnicity gap took somewhat longer to close than the gender gap, taking 2 years instead of 1 to close almost completely, by 93%.

Goal-setting intervention results for the ethnic minority academic achievement gap: retention rate

- At the students' university where the study took place, they are allowed to skip regularly-scheduled exams and wait for exam re-sits instead. The researchers hypothesized that a decrease in number of re-sits would mark increased commitment to achieving their goals. 
- Univariate ANOVA revealed that. There was a significant gender effect and a significant ethnicity effect in control cohorts in terms of number of exams taken.
- However, neither the gender effect nor the ethnicity effect remained significant in the intervention cohort. 

Goal-setting intervention results: additional analysis of exam re-sits

- Separate univariate ANOVA revealed a decrease in the academic achievement differences of male/female subgroups in the intervention cohort when compared to the control cohort.
- Analysis of the control cohort showed significant main effects of gender.The gender effect was no longer significant in the intervention cohort.

Goal-setting intervention results for the gender achievement gap: academic achievement

- There was a marked reduction in the gender gap with respect to retention after 1 year. In the control cohorts, there was a difference of 8.6 percentage points between female students (Retention = 62.8%) and male students (Retention = 54.2%). 
- The post-intervention retention difference shrank to 0.2 percentage points in the intervention cohort (Retentionfemale students = 72.0%; Retentionmale students = 71.8%), a gender gap reduction of 97.67%. Thus, the goal-setting intervention virtually eliminated the gender gap in retention.

Learn Before

Related