2016 ISN National Conference on Educational Innovation

Joshua Aronson is associate professor of developmental, social, and educational psychology, at NYU. He is also a research scientist at the Metro Center for Urban Education. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from Princeton University. Before coming to NYU, he was on the faculty at the University of Texas and was a postdoctoral scholar and lecturer at Stanford University. Aronson’s research focuses on the social and psychological influences on academic achievement. Among the most widely cited social scientists in the past decade, Aronson is internationally known for his research on “stereotype threat” and minority student achievement, research that offers a strong challenge to traditional genetic and sociological explanations of why African Americans and Latinos perform less well on tests of intelligence than their White counterparts, and why women trail men in hard math and science. Aronson’s research with colleague Claude Steele has been cited in three Supreme Court cases and is considered a modern classic in social psychology, with over 4600 citations in scientific publications. Aronson has authored numerous chapters and scholarly articles on this work and is the Editor of Improving Academic Achievement: Impact of Psychological Factors on Education (Academic Press) and Readings about the Social Animal, (Worth), and Co Author of the Social Animal. His work for the past decade has been devoted to enhancing the school experiences of disadvantaged students and improving their learning and test performance. This work has been highly influential in the field of education, intelligence testing, law and social psychology—featured in best selling books like Blink, The Nurture Assumption, How Children Succeed, and Mindset: The Psychology of Success, among many others. Aronson has received several awards and grants for his research including Early Career awards from the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the National Science Foundation, and the G. Stanley Hall Lecturer Award from the American Psychological Association, and the William T. Grant Faculty Scholars award. He was the founding director of the Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education at New York University and now directs the Metro Center For Achievement Research and Evaluation (Metro CARE) at New York University.