Research Paper on:
Cultural Influences on Cognition: A View of Learning for At-Risk African American Males: An Introduction

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
educational studies for decades. Though researchers have considered a variety of different mitigating factors that place urban Black males in high risk categories for academic failure, few studies have  adequately explored the influence that culture has on cognition and the implications for this population. Defining a basis for determining familial and cultural influences on cognitive development could provide  a means of understanding the vast array of influences on academic performance. For African American males, who struggle with identification, stigmatization and expectations of failure, familial and social culture  can be a basis for creating positive change and infusing messages of academic success. Statement of the Problem African American males currently comprise the largest population of academic  underachievers in the United States. African American males are more likely to have low grade point averages, poor test performance, and high drop out rates when compared with their  White Anglo-European counterparts (IEE, 2004). In urban centers where there are large populations of African Americans, drop out rates far exceed national averages. The District of Colombia,  for example, has a dropout rate that exceeds 8 percent in 1999, and some research suggests in some schools drop out rates may currently be as high as 40% (IEE,  2004). "The majority of reporting states-26 out of the 46 responding to the latest survey-have dropout rates ranging from 4.0% to 7.0%. The average dropout rate is 4.2%"  (IEE, 2004). The crisis for the African American male has been identified on a number of levels in the current literature. The connection, though, between cultural factors  and cognition has not been widely studied, and may be a means of assessing the mitigating factors for poor academic performance in African American males.