Article - "Want girls to do better in school? Surround them with smart classmates.

[Holly Pon]

The Right Kind of Peer Pressure
Want girls to do better in school? Surround them with smart
classmates.
By Ray Fisman
Posted Wednesday, May 12, 2010, at 7:04 AM ET
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In 1995, clinical psychologist and therapist Mary Pipher rose to
national prominence with the publication of Reviving Ophelia, a
runaway best-seller that described the many perils confronted by girls
coming of age in America. Pipher wrote that around junior high, "many
confident, well-adjusted girls were transformed into sad and angry
failures." Pressures from teachers, parents, and especially peers were
producing a generation of eating-disordered, substance-abusing,
academically underachieving girls.

Two recent studies suggest that Pipher's basic observation about
girls' vulnerability to peer pressure remains true, but they emphasize
that peer pressure can sometimes be a good thing. The studies examined
the academic achievement of high school students and found that being
surrounded by underachieving classmates has a negative effect on girls
and boys—both genders feel pressure to conform to the lower standards
of their peers. But the studies also show that girls are more
sensitive than boys to the presence of high-achieving peers. Surround
a girl with diligent classmates, and her performance will improve.

There are two basic challenges that have confounded social scientists'
efforts to analyze how we're influenced by our peers. First, our peers
don't drop from the sky—we tend to associate with others who are like
us to begin with or those whom we'd like to emulate. Friends may
pressure friends to do drugs, or friends may become friends because
they share a rebellious streak that involves doing drugs. Friends also
tend to read the same magazines, shop at the same stores, attend the
same classes—so if they act the same, it may not be because they
pressure each other, but because they are both swayed by the same
influences. Economists refer to this as the reflection problem: If two
people are moving in tandem, is the left one mimicking the right or
vice versa? Or is some invisible force moving both simultaneously?

Researchers have had to get creative to try to overcome the reflection
problem. One recent study by Cornell economist Kirabo Jackson measures
peer influences by taking advantage of the peculiarities of the high
school assignment process in his home country of Trinidad. Testing
starts early for Trinidadian children, who take placement exams in
fifth grade to determine where they will study through to high school
graduation. While students get to rank schools based on location and
other preferences, for the most part high scorers attend the best
schools in Trinidad and low scorers attend vocational schools. This
means that high-scoring fifth-graders will end up in well-funded
schools surrounded by other high-scoring students and taught by the
island's best teachers. So they tend to go on to do well on their
standardized tests at the end of high school. But the quality of each
class at any given school will vary from year to year for
idiosyncratic reasons: It was a particularly competitive year; new
school buses opened up different school choices. As a result, two
students who have the same incoming test scores but who are a year
apart may end up at the same school with the same teachers and the
same financial resources, but with very different peers.

Jackson obtained the school records of more than 150,000 Trinidadian
students entering sixth grade between 1995 and 2002 and followed them
through to graduation in 10th grade, when all students again take a
set of standardized exams. He found that students who attended high
school with high-achieving peers performed better at graduation,
passing more of their final exams than students who went to the same
school in a different year, when the crop of classmates was weaker.
Intriguingly, the effect of high-achieving peers was much more
positive for girls than for boys. Jackson's results suggest that boys
may, in fact, pass fewer exams when surrounded by high-achievers,
while girls' graduation exam pass rates are helped by having bookish
classmates. While the overall effects are modest—a girl in a strong
class might pass one-tenth more exams than if she had been in a weaker
one—it appears to be several times stronger for girls enrolled in
Trinidad's best schools. (Even boys seem to get a small boost from
good peers at these top schools.)

These patterns are echoed in a study of English high school students
by Victor Lavy at Hebrew University and Olmo Silva and Felix Weinhardt
of the London School of Economics. As in Trinidad, there is a complete
reshuffling of peer groups when students enter high school in England.
And the findings from this study are remarkably similar to those
reported from Trinidad: As measured by performance on exams taken
three years after entering high school, girls respond positively to
high-achieving peers, while boys actually seem to perform worse when
confronted with smart classmates. (The British study also found that
girls responded more strongly to high-achieving female peers than to
male ones.)

The studies don't really take a stand on what might account for these
differences between girls and boys. Kirabo Jackson suggests that boys'
negative response to a strong peer group may be due to the male sex's
inherent competitiveness—boys who want to be the alpha math student
may opt out of the competition if Einstein is sitting at the adjacent
desk and focus instead on being the best at football or beer drinking.
I also asked Jacquelynne Eccles, director of the Gender and
Achievement Research Program at the University of Michigan, what she
made of the findings. She suggested that it may relate in part to the
gender stereotypes of an earlier era, when men were bosses, women were
secretaries, and smart girls ended up as frumpy, bespectacled
academics. Brainy girls weren't cool. Yet, over the past couple of
decades, girls have caught up to their male counterparts and then
some, reversing the gender gap in SAT scores, high school graduation
rates, and college enrollment. As girls have started to outdo boys
academically, smart girls may no longer suffer the same rejection by
their peers, and they may feel even more empowered to achieve in the
classroom if many of their fellow students—especially the female ones—
are high achievers themselves. (Eccles also suggested that
capitalization—the process of telling others about one's success,
which can be a reward in itself for excelling—could play a role if
girls are more sensitive to standing out above others. In the absence
of smart peers, girls would have to keep their accomplishments to
themselves, which takes some of the pleasure out of doing well.)

The takeaway from all of this is clear for parents looking to maximize
their kids' SAT scores—surround your daughters with smart peers and
make sure to keep any kid, boy or girl, away from the influence of
academic laggards. Both boys (discouraged by stiff competition) and
girls (deterred by peer disapproval) might also look back on the
advice dispensed by Mary Pipher in the closing pages of Reviving
Ophelia. Adolescents, she writes, need to "forge self-definitions
independent of peer pressure." Remembering the intense longing for
acceptance in my own awkward early teens, I suspect this is easier
said than done.

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Ray Fisman is the Lambert Family professor of social enterprise and
director of the Social Enterprise Program at the Columbia Business
School. He is at work on a book about the economics of office life.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2253506/


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