The Impact of Stereotypes on Teens at PLHS1.) Stereotypes and racism have always been a problem in this and many other societies. Teens are commonly the most affected by stereotypes, not unlike most teens at Point Loma High School. To explore this further, my class read "How a Self-Fulfilling Stereotype Can Decrease Performance" by Shankar Vedantam, science correspondent for NPR. In his informative article, Vedantam discusses how research shows that self-fulfilling stereotypes can reduce the performance of many individuals. He supports his claim by presenting statistics such as "When blacks and whites answered 10 vocabulary questions asked by a white interviewer, blacks on average answered 5.49 questions correctly and whites answered 6.33 correctly", and talking about how black students tend to score better on tests administered by other blacks, and finally explaining how all students' performance increases when they are not reminded of their race/gender before taking a test. Vedantam's purpose is to inform the public about the negative aspects of reminding students of their race before a test, in an effort to prevent poor performance and raise test scores. After reading this, my class decided to pursue a research project about stereotypes in our school and how they affect a variety of students. 2.) We began our study by interviewing a classmate, then interviewing another PLHS student for homework and recording our data. We then proceeded to fill out a Google Form, which helped us enter the anonymous data into a data table and combine it. Next, we sorted and graphed the data by gender and ethnicity to see how different groups responded to each question. After doing…half of the paper… In my opinion, it's as simple as trying to avoid judging another individual at first sight or classifying them into a certain stereotype or group. Eliminating the part of the test in which students must pass the competition would also be a beneficial gesture. I am sure that this society has done almost everything reasonable to prevent the growth of stereotypes and racism, and the rest is up to the individuals. If a person stopped judging others based on stereotypes, others would gradually start to do so too. It doesn't seem like much, but overall it can really make a difference. Furthermore, I believe we should accept the fact that there is no immaculate perception and work to improve ourselves, our perception of this world, and the way we see and analyze other human beings. Works Cited Shanka vedantam, Jerry Kong