User:Mwevitt

Mark Evitt is a journalist based in Los Angeles. He is currently a student at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He is a co-editor of the online news site Neon Tommy.

Wikipedia page review
As a psychology major in college, with a focus on social psychology, I chose to review the article on stereotype threat. I evaluated the quality of the story, the quality of the references, the neutrality of the story and read the discussion page.

Story Quality
The article gives the history of the research of stereotype threat, but misses quoting from the original study done by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, referencing an Atlantic Monthly article that describes the study, instead. The original study is referenced later in the article. While the documentation of stereotype threat is recognized as a major advance in social psychology, one does not get that impression from this article. Overall the quality of the article is not very good. Steele and Aronson's conclusions are not very controversial today, but the article doesn't give that impression. There is no breakdown of what are the controversial parts of stereotype threat and and what are the accepted parts. There is not enough overview of the research, and placing stereotype threat in the larger context of social psychology. This article needs to be largely re-written, with an introductory social psychology textbook used as a reference source.

Reference Quality
There have been hundreds of studies done on stereotype threat, and the referencing is very haphazard in the Wikipedia article. It's unclear what important studies came after Steele and Aronson's original research. There is no suggestion of how the narrative has changed in the 15 years since the first study.

Neutrality
The story isn't very well organized, so the neutrality of the article comes into question. In the heading "Interpreting stereotype threat," there are a number of studies referenced that question the conclusions of Steele and Aronson. There is also a separate heading "File Drawer Effect," which also challenges the overall conclusions of stereotype effect. The article would be much better if it were reorganized and a new section called "Challenges to Stereotype Threat conclusions" was created. There are also specific problems with the file drawer effect study. While it is cited as a major challenge to the stereotype effect research, the entire study isn't sourced, just a summary. It's unclear if this study has been peer-reviewed.

Story Discussions
The discussion page on stereotype threat is pretty light. A graph was removed and replaced, and another graph was removed. Over the past three years there have only been a few modifications to the page.