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Race and Racialized Identity: Cognition Pillar
Resources to help broaden representation related to race and racialized identity across the cognition pillar of APA’s National Standards for High School Psychology Curricula
Research summaries
Suggested instructions: These research summaries can be incorporated into a lecture or shared with students as a reading to demonstrate how psychological science explores the diversity of human experience. These resources can also be used to encourage students to identify the major components of a research study (i.e., the hypothesis or study question, sample, method, and findings). Students can be asked to identify potential limitations of the study and encouraged to discuss the implications for our understanding of human behavior. Keywords highlight how concepts within and across pillars are incorporated into a single research study.
Sample research summaries
A comparison of clinicians’ racial biases in the United States and France
Study investigated how patient race influences medical practitioners’ perceptions of their prognosis and care provided
Constructing explicit prejudice: Evidence from large sample datasets
Study examined the connection between implicit negative affect, explicit prejudice, and negative stereotypes
Income, wealth, and Black-White disparities in cognition
Researchers investigated how income and wealth might account for current racial disparities in cognitive function and cognitive disorders
Psychologist profiles
Suggested instructions: These profiles can be shared with students to enhance the visibility of psychologists of diverse backgrounds. As an additional activity, students can be asked to conduct research to learn more about the psychologist and their work. An alternative assignment could be to ask students to find other psychologists of diverse backgrounds whose work falls into this content pillar. Keywords highlight how psychological scientists study concepts within and across pillars.
Sample psychologist profiles
An educational psychologist who was one of the first African Americans to earn a doctorate in psychology
A cognitive psychologist whose research focuses on age-related changes in attention and memory
A social and clinical psychologist who was the first person to examine how the race of the examiner could influence IQ scores
This cognitive psychologist was the first Native American to earn a doctoral degree in psychology
The development of resources to broaden diversity and representation in the teaching of high school psychology resources is an APA Committee of Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools initiative supported by funding from the American Psychological Foundation David and Carol Myers Fund. This resource was developed by Eric Castro, Shawn C.T. Jones, PhD, Allyn Olsen, and Catherine Sanderson, PhD.
Date created: August 2023