Changes in attitudes toward Negroes of white elementary school students after use of multiethnic readers

Publication Year
1969

Type

Journal Article
Abstract

Investigated the effect of curriculum materials which portray Negroes in a way which is contradictory to prevailing prejudices and stereotypes upon the attitudes toward Negroes of white 2nd-grade school children in a Midwestern city. A pretest-posttest design controlling for the teacher, the classroom, the school, and the reading ability of Ss was used. The 34 children in the experimental groups used a multiethnic reader which included characters from several different racial and ethnic groups for 4 mo., while the 34 children in the control groups used the regular reader which included only whites. Use of the multiethnic reader resulted in marked positive change in Ss' attitudes toward Negroes, supporting the counter-conditioning hypothesis. (23 ref.) (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal
Journal of Educational Psychology
Volume
60
Pages
148-152
Type of Article
Journal Article
Full text

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METHOD

This study employed a pretest-posttest control group design. [...] Sixty-eight white, middle-class children were studied, 34 classified by their teachers as upper group readers and 34 classified as middle group readers. [...] Eight reading groups in four second-grade classrooms in two public elementary schools participated in the study. Through random assignment, two classrooms (one in each school) used the multiethnic reader in their upper reading group and the regular reader in their middle reading group. The other two classrooms (one in each school) used the regular reader in their upper reading group and the multiethnic reader in their middle reading group. [...] For both the pretest and the posttest each child was interviewed individually. Four tests were presented in random order and all were given in one sitting. [...] The instruments used in this study were a variation of the Clark Doll Test, the Horowitz and Horowitz (1938) "Show Me" and Categories tests, and a Direct Comparison test. [...]

Type of Prejudice/Bias
Country
Method