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Abstract

Researchers report an association of racial discrimination to academic achievement for racial/ethnic minority students. Racial discrimination is manifest on multiple levels, including interpersonal discrimination, discrimination in schools, and societal and cultural discrimination. Researchers have generally focused their efforts on examining the effects of one type of discrimination on academic achievement. Further, mediators of this relation have not been fully explored. In a sample of 78 college students, we found only interpersonal racial/ethnic discrimination, and not school-based or societal discrimination was negatively associated with GPA. However, the effects did not hold once controlling for demographic factors. We examined two potential mediators of the relations of interpersonal discrimination to GPA: acculturative stress and academic self-efficacy. Interpersonal discrimination was positively associated with acculturative stress but not related to academic self-efficacy. Societal discrimination was associated with academic self-efficacy. However, neither acculturative stress nor academic self-efficacy mediated the relations of discrimination to GPA.

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