Exploring Black Achievement: Ethnic Identity and its relationship to academic attainment

Identity is the self-construct by which individuals make sense of themselves in relation to others, and the world around them.

Racial and ethnic identity (REI) is the term used to describe a sense of belonging and connectedness to a particular ethnic or racial group.

REI is an area of development that has mostly been explored with teenagers and adults in America. Research has found that positive REI can contribute to an individual's self-esteem, psychological well-being and how they achieve academically.

In the Western world, ethnic minority pupils are consistently reported as achieving significantly behind their peers.

Some researchers have suggested that a positive ethnic and racial identity can be a predictive and risk-reducing factor for the academic achievement of ethnic minority students.

The findings of the systematic literature review indicated that there was inconclusive evidence to support the relationship between racial and ethnic identity associations and academic attainment.

However, the majority of papers were judged as having low methodological quality.

The review also highlighted the difficulties in integrating the existing research on the relationship between racial and ethnic identity and academic attainment and recommendations are given to address this. In addition, few studies explored the influence of group differences, and no studies investigated the intersections of ethnicity and gender.

The empirical paper explored the achievement of Black African and Caribbean pupils in Key Stage 3, by investigating their racial and ethnic identity associations in relation to school related outcomes.

Findings indicated REI predicts self-esteem in early adolescence, and beliefs about in-group achievement values negatively predicted English attainment.

In addition interactions were found between ethnicity and gender on REI, indicating that females and Caribbean pupils had more strongly developed identities.

Exploratory analysis revealed that there were group interactions on academic attainment. However the sample size was insufficient to run a thorough analysis.