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Researching "Black" Educational Experiences and Outcomes: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations

Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and associate professor of education at the University of Michigan, School of Education, 610 E. University Avenue, 4001SEB, Ann Arbor, MI 48109–1259; coconnor{at}umich.edu. Her research focuses on the racial identity, academic experience, and educational resilience of Black youth.

Amanda Lewis

Associate professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Department of African American Studies and Department of Sociology, 601 S. Morgan, M/C 069, 1217 UH, Chicago, IL 60607; aelewis{at}uic.edu. Her research focuses on how race shapes educational opportunities from kindergarten through graduate school and how our ideas about race are negotiated in everyday life.

Jennifer Mueller

Assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201; jennjm{at}uwm.edu. Her research focuses on teacher education, particularly on policy, pedagogy, and programming to create learning environments that prepare teachers for effective, equitable teaching in urban and diverse schools

This article delineates how race has been undertheorized in research on the educational experiences and outcomes of Blacks. The authors identify two dominant traditions by which researchers have invoked race (i.e., as culture and as a variable) and outline their conceptual limitations. They analyze how these traditions mask the heterogeneity of the Black experience, underanalyze institutionalized productions of race and racial discrimination, and confound causes and effects in estimating when and how race is "significant." The authors acknowledge the contributions of more recent scholarship and discuss how future studies of Black achievement might develop more sophisticated conceptualizations of race to inform more rigorous methodological examinations of how, when, and why Black students perform in school as they do.

Key Words: achievement gap • Black achievement • race

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