This talk from Joshua Aronson is simply outstanding:
I recall a graduate school course where a guest speaker was discussing the importance of opportunity to learn. This self-explanatory idea can easily be forgotten in debates about education. However, contrary to the speaker’s perspective, opportunity to learn is not enough. Students must also have the drive to learn.
To understand the importance of having drive to learn, consider your own life as you balance different things that you “want” to do. For example, I want to learn German. However, I do not want to learn German more than I want to help Learning Unlimited succeed, more than I want to read the new George R.R. Martin book, or more than I want to maintain a blog. Hence, I do not learn German. Similarly, all students want to learn and want to go to college—but perhaps not more than they want to hang out with friends, monitor their social status, or earn some extra money. That’s why wanting to learn or go to college is not enough. You have to be driven to learn; your self-identity must be that of someone who learns, a scholar, in order to make it a priority for you.
Although Aronson’s talk is about “stereotype threat”, the impact of students’ self-identity as it is reinforced by stereotypes of their groups (gender, race, etc.), one conclusion to draw is the importance of self-identity to academic success.
In case you didn’t watch his talk, here is just some of the evidence he cites:
- Fear has a big impact on intelligence. “In the two weeks following a homicide in the South Side of Chicago, the IQ scores of the black children in a pretty large radius around the homicide will suffer a half a standard deviation decrement” (time index 15:30). [Aronson goes on to talk about “threatened belongingness” having the same effect, showing how important social life is to learning.]
- You probably already know that if you’re asked to indicate your race prior to a test and you’re African American or Latino, then your score goes down. On math tests, Asians asked about their race see their scores go up (but their English scores go down). Women asked about their gender on math tests see their scores go down, men see their scores go up. Older people asked about their age prior to a test of memory see their scores go down. (Back to the math scores for a moment. Because the AP calculus exam asks for gender before the exam, some 5000 women do not pass who would otherwise have passed — time index 36:30.)
- What may be more surprising is the same effect for miniature golf. If, prior to playing miniature golf, the group is told that it is a measure of “kinesthetic intelligence” (emphasis mine), then you get a better score if you’re white and a worse score if you’re black. In contrast, if you’re told that it’s a measure of “natural athletic ability”, then this reverses and black participants see their performance go up! (Time index 26:30.)
- White male engineering students from Stanford were given a test. In one group, they were told that the study was on “math ability — what makes some people smarter at math than others”. In the other group, they were told that the study was about why “Asians are good at math”. This second group scored 30% less well. This is a full standard deviation, the size of the black-white gap. (Time index 29:40.)
- Let’s move on to solutions. “Students who are high self-monitors are much less likely to experience stereotype threat.” “People who are high self-monitors are really good at thinking about the situation they’re in and considering the consequences, and the stereotype threat just sort of bounces right off of them.” (Time index 35:45.) Teaching self-monitoring might get around the stereotype threat!
- Asking students questions that make them think about membership in intellectual communities changes their scores. For example, reminding students that they go to a selective college before the test (via the question “Can you tell us a few things a student might like about being a student at a highly-selective liberal arts college?”) nearly eliminates the gender gap. (Time index 52:40.) In other words, building a positive community membership can raise students’ achievement.
- Finally, if you listen to nothing else, I highly encourage you to listen to the description of Crellin Elementary School at time index 56:00. It is a school that has truly managed to give students an intellectual identity, and to create an intellectual community. In three years, the principal turned the school around from 0% to 100% proficiency on the state exam, with 50% reaching an advanced level. Seven years after leaving the school, its students form 75% of the AP courses at the high school, despite the extreme poverty and tough home conditions of the students. I won’t try to describe what the principal does. You should hear it yourself.
I have been appreciating more and more the importance of students’ self-identity. Do they see themselves as scholars? Do they see themselves as people who enjoy learning? (This is a critically different question from “do they enjoy learning?”) I’m sure that it matters not just to immediate scores on tests, but also to learning over time.
How much stronger would students be with better self-identities? How much would their performance improve if we gave them the ability to self-monitor and thereby get around their stereotypes? One thing is clear: we must design our programs to build students’ self-identity as scholars, and we must do so as early in their lives as possible.
Update 02/29/12: A recent meta analysis calls stereotype threat into question, although there are claims that the meta analysis is, itself, biased. The meta analysis still found effects among top performers, and was unclear on effects for average performers.
Consider Learning 
I haven’t found the time to watch the video yet, but I wanted to say that just reading your post was an immensely helpful reminder to me that in order for me to actually do something, it isn’t enough to just *want* to do that thing; rather, my self-identity has to be of someone who does that thing.