Clearly President Barack Obama has a lot on his plate right now. But he should take heart ??? some are saying he may have already boosted test scores! According to this fascinating article in the New York Times this morning, there's new research (yet to be peer-reviewed) showing that ???a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama's nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.??? The researchers call it an Obama effect.
To conduct their study, they administered a test four times during the presidential campaign to groups of people, both black and white, ranging in age from 18-63. When it was initially administered, whites on average answered about 12 out of 20 questions correctly and blacks on average answered about 8.5 correctly. But on tests given right after Obama accepted the nomination, and after he won the presidential election, black performance improved and the performance gap essentially evaporated.
(The study was led by researchers from Vanderbilt University, San Diego State University and Northwestern, and has been submitted for review to The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.)