Also as in the Cohen research, they were followed all the way through high school. The results were presented in three reports— the first published in 2016 and the last in 2021. This research, too, found that the self-affirmation intervention, in its first year, significantly improved the academic performance of Black and Hispanic students in schools where they were lower in number and in level of achievement— precisely the conditions in which their identity threat would be greatest. And again, this effect lasted. From the seventh grade through the last year of high school, the racial achievement gap for affirmed students grew 50 percent less each year than the gap for non-affirmed students. The achievement gap between white and Asian students and Black and Latino students had decreased by 42 percent by the end of high school. And the intervention increased the percentage of minority students eventually graduation from high school on time by 10 percentage points. All of this from a twenty-minute affirmation exercise in the seventh grade! It launched a process of ever-increasing engagement with school that lifted these students’ trajectories of achievement.

But Black students have lived with their racial identity. They know it can matter. They didn’t know that it would matter in this instance. But they knew it could. Thus their predicament. To be safe, not to be misled, they were less trusting. They stayed in churn.

Such caution has its costs. There could be value in that feedback. It might help them with their essay and their writing generally. Trusting less means they’d miss out on that benefit. And this would happen over and over in a diverse school.

So, the cognitive-accountability paradigm may keep out of view, or at least in dim view, something very important to the academic achievement of students like Tyler— the social-psychological dimension of his school experience, including that tied to his identity. The cognitive-accountability paradigm is essentially identity-blind. It knows that this aspect of a student’s experience can affect school achievement— for example, that it can be helpful when student experience is shaped by a middle-class background and less so when it is shaped by a lower income background.

Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen tested the effect of a similar intervention at the college level. They exposed freshmen to a persuasive message that presented the social stresses of college life as transient and as something everyone experiences. This message improved Black students’ grades over their next three years in college when compared to Black students who didn’t get this message. How did it do this? Further analysis showed that it helped Black students see college stress as something not peculiar to their identity. It reduced their identity threat. They could trust their environment more— churn less— and their grades reflected it.

Looked at from the standpoint of cognitive accountability, these strategies— socio-emotional learning strategies or strategies reducing the identity threat many students can experience in school— can seem beside the point, of marginal importance, not rooted in cognitive principles of learning. But looked at from the standpoint of building students’ trust in their schooling and their identification with it, they have a clear unity: They all address Tyler’s primary need to trust, care about, and engage with school. The good news here is that from an expanded paradigm— the identification paradigm— falls a much-expanded set of fixes.