Rider to Host Second Annual Goldstein Lecture on Prejudice Reduction

Rider University will host the Second Annual Marvin W. Goldstein Lecture on Prejudice Reduction on Wednesday, October 29, at 7 p.m. in the Bart Luedeke Center Theater on its Lawrenceville campus. All are invited to this free event.

This year’s lecture will feature Joshua Aronson, Ph.D., an associate professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, who will speak on Stereotypes and the Nature and Nurture of Intelligence.

Aronson’s research focuses on the social and psychological influences on academic achievement. He is internationally known for his research on “stereotype threat” – a performance-inhibiting phenomenon that occurs when students confront the negative expectations of the particular stereotypes assigned to their race – and minority student achievement. Aronson’s studies show that a minimization of the stereotype threat in testing situations can eliminate much of the gap between blacks and whites on standardized tests. This research offers a strong challenge to traditional, genetic explanations of why African-Americans and Latinos achieve lower scores on tests of intelligence than their Caucasian counterparts, and why women trail men in hard math and science.

Currently working with methods of boosting the learning and test performance of underachieving youth, Aronson is one of the most widely cited social scientists of the past decade. He has authored numerous chapters and scholarly articles and is the editor of Improving Academic Achievement: Impact of Psychological Factors on Education, published by Academic Press. Aronson, who earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Psychology from Princeton University, as well as a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California-Berkeley, has a forthcoming book entitled The Nurture of Intelligence.
 
This endowed lecture series honors the 38-year career of Marvin W. Goldstein, Ph.D., a member of the Rider University Department of Psychology and the co-director of The Julius and Dorothy Koppelman Holocaust and Genocide Resource Center at Rider.

 

Return to News@RIDER