Closing the African American Achievement Gap in Higher Education 
Alfred P. Rovai, Louis B. Gallien, Jr., & Helen R. Stiff- Williams, Editors
Teachers College Press (New York) 2007
$49, 212 pages, hardcover
Reviewed by Denise Clay
Ph.D. Candidate
The University of Oklahoma
African Americans achieve at lower levels in higher education than do their majority culture equals. Unfortunately, this achievement gap is widening. Whereas educational research efforts in the United States direct a good deal of investigating educational achievement in the K-12 school milieu, higher education has enjoyed limited research with regard to closing the achievement gap. This timely book addresses closing the achievement gap for African Americans in higher education offering strategies intended to help improve African-American student achievement in higher education institutions.
Closing the African American Achievement Gap in Higher Education is comprehensive in its scope, offering the reader a plethora of causes for the African-American achievement gap in higher education, its effects on African-American students, and approaches that higher education institutions and faculty members in those institutions can take to close the gap. Chapter 1 defines the achievement gap for African-American students and identifies numerous causes concerning conditions within schools and institutional factors contributing to the educational achievement gap. The second chapter describes the African-American cultural orientation toward learning and emphasizes the social, dialogical aspect of learning and the high-context nature that relies on nonverbal and informal communication. Also discussed is how hip-hop culture influences the learning and achievements of African-American students.
Chapter 3 addresses how school culture, interacting with African-American culture and hip-hop subculture, can influence student achievement, while Chapter 4 provides a foundational discussion of diversity and learning on college campuses, recommends some important theories that could aid with informing practice, and describes a representative sampling of exemplary programs based on the principles of andragogy, self-directedness, and multicultural education aimed at closing this African-American achievement gap in higher education.
Chapter 5 focuses on the institutional, situational and cultural or dispositional challenges to student achievement in the traditional classroom that African-American college students tend to face. The various roles that teachers should fulfill in the traditional learning setting to facilitate the development of African-American students is the focus of Chapter 6. Teachers are urged to adapt their teaching approaches to suit students’ backgrounds, by using student-centered approaches, varying the conditions of learning to address the learning and cognitive preferences of black students, building on students’ prior knowledge and experiences, and adopting the roles of engager, motivator, model, and mentor with students.
Chapter 7 examines the challenges that African-American students face within the information age environment and the application of technology for distance education. In concert with Chapter 7, Chapter 8 addresses how an instructor in the virtual classroom environment can ease or eliminate the challenges that threaten learning in the virtual setting. The same success strategies, recommended in Chapter 6 for instructors to use in the traditional classroom, are advocated for use in the virtual classroom.
Chapter 9 addresses how classroom assessment strategies can support both the traditional classroom and virtual classroom settings, while Chapter 10 provides background on the success of African Americans in higher education and highlights strategies to help minority students succeed in higher education.
The social science researchers who serve as the book’s authors approach the African-American achievement gap as being exacerbated by societal inequities, teaching/learning inequities, the influences of the hip-hop culture and school culture, and race with regard to how higher education institutions interface with African-American students. These influences lay the foundation for understanding strategies offered to close the achievement gap for African-American students in the higher education setting.
Throughout the book, evidence is provided to support the claims made by the various scholars, concerning American College Test (ACT) and Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores by ethnic group, undergraduate grades by ethnic group, higher education enrollment and completion rates by ethnic group, higher education earned degrees (and percentages) conferred by gender and ethnic group, steadfast African-American cultural characteristics, and comparisons between low-context and high context cultures, etc. The facts and theories are clear and presented in a logical manner. For example, the claim is made that African-American students are less likely to enroll in postsecondary schools than are White peers and once enrolled are less likely to obtain a degree. This claim is supported by relevant and timely statistics. The writing style of the authors is of a scholastic nature with the provision of scholarly reference citations.
Turning to the book’s organization, it is well ordered, progressing from influences that contribute to the African-American achievement gap, to strategies that combat the inequities, to model programs to consider as examples to emulate. Furthermore, the book addresses the achievement gap in both the traditional classroom and virtual classroom settings and offers strategies for reversing the gap in the two settings.
Readers’ expectations will no doubt be met in the reading of this book, for it not only offers the research of multiple scholars on the factors that contribute to the African-American achievement gap, but provides solutions to help close the gap. In sum, the presentation of information in this book can be said to be fair and accurate. Although the book’s focus is on closing the achievement gap for African-American students, implementing some of the strategies promoted in the book regarding cultural diversity of students is critical to academic achievement amongst all students. What might have been missing from the book are strategies that African-American students can adopt as individuals to help themselves overcome obstacles to academic achievement. However, the major conclusion of this book seems to be that policy makers, administrators and educators must focus on inequities in their institutions by removing obstacles that block the progress of African-American students to ensure that these students have equitable opportunities to achieve academic success. This book can serve as a text for university courses on education and it can serve as a functional reference for higher education faculty, administrators and designers of both traditional and distributed courses. I look upon this book as a laudable must read and as a contribution to the field of higher education