WISE INTERVENTIONS

7th-grade students in a middle-class suburban middle school with a student body composed of about half African American and half White students in the northeastern United States identified personally important values from a short list and then wrote about why these were important to them in several 15-20-minute in-class writing exercises beginning at the outset of 7th-grade. As compared to multiple active control conditions, this exercise raised African American students’ course grades that semester, an effect that replicated in a second study. Across the two studies, the improvement in grades was associated with a 40% reduction in the racial achievement gap. The intervention also reduced the percentage of African American students who received a D or below from 20% to 9%. Moreover, the values-affirmation intervention improved GPA over the next two years, especially for initially low-performing students (Cohen et al., 2009), and bolstered students’ sense of belonging in school (Cook et al., 2012). Six years after the original intervention, African American students who had received the affirmation were more likely to enroll in college (92% versus 78%; Goyer, Garcia et al., 2017)