A Study On The Threat Effect Of Stereotype In Higher Vocational College Students

A stereotype is a belief about a group of individualsC Kanahara.2006).The essenceof the stereotype is classif\ing specific groups or population by some criteria,combining the standard of the classification u ith certain characters. Stereotype threatis a situational predi’cament in which peoples behaviors may verify the negativestereotype (Steele&Aronson,1995). Studies have shown lhat (Mangels, Good&Whiteman.2012)the negative stereotypes of vulnerable groups not only harm thestudents’ acadcmic performance, but also harm the learning process. Group identity isone of the important inlfuence factors of stereotype threat and the constituentcomponents of the individ’uals self-concept People obtain the value and emotion bythe awareness of the membership of the group (Taifel,1978). Group identity containsthe cognition of the group and the appreciation of the emotion and value in thispopulation.Vocational and technical education，including the levels of undergraduate andspecialist, is the higher education based on middle school and high school, whichcontains vocational colleges, vocational and technical Teachcrs College and universityworkers. Compared with colleges and universities, vocational and technical educationis recognized as the lower and is devalued by the society, which leading thevocational students to be relatively vulnerable groups.The first study explored the vocational college students’ group identity byimplicit and explicit methods, which found that the implicit identity and the explicitidentity are both positive but not significantly related. I he implicit identity and theexplicit identity are two dimensions not related. The second study explored thestereotypes held by college students through interviews and investigation, whichfound that the stereotype was relatively negative. Then we explored the moderatorrole of group identity to the stereotype threat. The results showed that stereotypethreat hampered working memory. And, in the condition of stereotype threat，studentswith higher group identity performed worse than students with lower group identity.