The Association of Attention and Racial Group Processing on Cognitive Engagement

The increase in school drop-out rates has resulted in increased research on School Engagement Theory (SET), a theory that measures levels of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional engagement to explore a students’ school performance. However, SET fails to address the interactive roles of attention, memory and race. The concern is that a teachers’ ethnicity, when it differs from the student’s own ethnic identity, may inadvertently impact minorities’ cognitive engagement. The objective of the current research is to understand the relationship between attention and memory for socially signaled information and the possible racial differences that signaled information has on cognitive engagement (CE). We hypothesized that those individuals who self-identify as a minority, in experimental condition 1 (where the multi-response racial attitude vignette is presented first), will have slower reaction times compared to individuals in the control condition, who experience only the joint attention and memory task. Further, we expect that the priming of race will have a negative impact on the reaction time and accuracy for minorities and a positive impact (decreased reaction times and increased accuracy) on students who self-identify as Caucasian. We also expect to find that individuals with positive priming will evince faster reaction times and show heightened CE when compared to individuals with negative priming. We go on to describe research with students, from a university setting, that will provide data for administrators who are seeking to better understand the possible impacts on CE when pairing a diverse student body with a homogenous teaching staff.