Significant scholarly attention has recently been directed to the use of social-psychological interventions—designed to influence the way students perceive themselves within school—to bolster academic performance and close persistent racial-ethnic achievement gaps. While these brief, carefully designed interventions benefit targeted participants, they do very little to change the contexts that threaten their development. Through this dissertation, I explore how an adapted social-psychological intervention may enhance academic achievement while also shaping participants’ capacity to change their contexts, via the development of critical consciousness (CC).This project integrates social psychology and CC literatures to examine if a values-affirmation social-psychological intervention can raise students’ academic achievement while also fostering CC simultaneously. Two overarching research questions guide this project: Research Question 1: Can a CC values-affirmation intervention bolster students’ academic performance? and Research Question 2: Can a CC values-affirmation intervention also increase students’ CC, as measured by their levels of critical reflection, critical motivation, and/or critical action? Participants in this field experiment included 53 ninth and tenth grade students from public charter high schools in the Midwestern United States (Mage = 14.97). Participants were randomly assigned to one of two study conditions at the individual student level, the no-affirmation condition and the affirmation condition.The results of this study show promise in the use of a CC-oriented values-affirmation intervention to enhance students’ academic performance and foster CC simultaneously. Specifically, trend-level evidence suggested the intervention may have bolstered academic performance and raised levels of CC, or critical motivation in particular. The moderate effect sizes for GPA (d = .54) and for critical motivation (d = .56) outcomes suggested that the intervention was associated with increased academic performance and CC, though the non-normal distributions of these outcome variables suggested additional evidence was needed to substantiate this interpretation. Distributional differences in GPA and critical motivation, tested via independent samples Mann-Whitney U tests, were significant, which confirmed that the intervention may indeed have some positive effects in terms of raising participants’ academic performance and level of CC. Differences in critical reflection: perceived inequality, critical reflection: egalitarianism, and critical action: sociopolitical participation were non-significant, providing no evidence of intervention effects on these components of CC; however, these analyses may have been underpowered due to the small analytic sample used in the study. Ultimately, this field experiment holds implications for the fostering of CC, generally believed to be a slow and time-intensive process and suggests that it may be possible to utilize a values-affirmation intervention to bolster academic achievement and raise CC simultaneously.
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