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Joel Portillo (Psychology Major)
“When Being Bilingual Hurts: Reminding Latino Students that Spanish is the Primary Language at Home May Hurt Subsequent Performance on a Verbal Test”
Sponsor: Professor Kaiping Peng, Psychology

• Project Description
• Scholar's Photo
• Scholar's Journal

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Project Description\

Latinos and Blacks score the lowest on the SAT verbal section. Considering the weight that universities give to SATs when considering admissions, the implications of these statistics are great. Research documents the negative effects of stereotype threat, a fear of confirming negative stereotypes about a group with which one identifies, on performance in standardized tests. For example, reminding Blacks of their race prior to taking a standardized test impairs their performance. While race has been widely studied, the role of a subject’s primary language at home in activating stereotype threat has been ignored. Joel’s research aims to test whether language considered “non-standard English” activates stereotype threat, thus affecting the performance of bilingual Latino subjects on a difficult verbal test. This research will help to elucidate one of the possible impediments to Latinos’ academic success, further suggesting ways to boost achievement.

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Scholar's Photo 

“Holy Guacamole!”, said Joel. “My hypothesis was correct! Priming with language background really does impair subsequent performance on a standardized test”.

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Scholar's Journal

Holy Guacamole!

“Holy Guacamole! I can’t believe it worked!” I screamed in excitement after running a 5-minute statistical analysis which showed that my hypothesis was supported by the data. Indeed, implicitly priming ESL (English-as-a-Second-Language) students with their ESL identity impaired their performance on a subsequent verbal task. I was extremely happy that my results supported my hypothesis. However, behind that 5-minute statistical analysis lies a learning process that is far more valuable than the results themselves.

Three months before being able to run a 5-minute statistical analysis, I found myself starting a rather long process of building my project from the ground up. After reading an endless number of articles, I came up with a project. However, a week later, I had changed my project completely, including the topic itself. Being an ESL student myself, I felt very passionate about studying ESL students and how stereotypes can affect their performance when engaging on verbal tasks.

Planning took most of my time. I spent a couple of months putting together all the materials that I would need and making sure that my methods were valid and reliable. While planning my project was a fun yet stressful experience, I would say that running my project was even better. I love interacting with people and my project gave me a chance to do just that. The recruitment of subjects was the most stressful yet exciting part of my project. Being on a time limit put a lot of stress on my shoulders but also led me to be productive and efficient with my time. After some days of running participants, I finally had the data that I needed to analyze and put my hypothesis to the test.

I remember being extremely nervous. If my hypothesis hadn’t been supported, I must admit that I would have been sad. However, I had gone through the process and path of a researcher and this would stay with me forever, regardless of the results.

Confirming one’s hypothesis is such a great feeling. I felt so much happiness racing through my body when I saw that the results validated my assertions. “Holy Guacamole!” was what I screamed in reaction to the results. If I had to translate such a phrase, I would say that it means the following: this research experience has been my best experience as an undergraduate. It even beats going to football games every Saturday during the fall semester. In fact, it even beats going to a Big Game, embarrassing Stanford on the field, and making fun of those Stanford football fans that still dream of beating CAL.