The social science statement in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) stressed that desegregation would benefit both African American and White children. Eventually, it was recognized that integration, rather than mere desegregation, was important for benefits to be realized. A parallel argument is made in the legal cases concerning affirmative action in higher education: educational benefits of diversity depend on curricular and co‐curricular experience with diverse peers, not merely on their co‐existence in the same institution (Gurin, P., 1999, Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, & Gurin, 2002). Positive benefits of diversity were demonstrated in a study comparing students in a curricular diversity program with students in a matched control group (n = 174), and in a longitudinal survey of University of Michigan students (n = 1670).

Group inequalities in the United States are most often attributed to the characteristics of the individuals who belong to these groups; thinking about structural causes of group inequalities is rare. This paper reviews cognitive, cultural, and systemic reasons for this bias. The efficacy of education as a way to increase structural thinking was investigated in two studies of college students' causal thinking about group inequalities. Both studies involved a course on intergroup relations that covered structural sources of racial or ethnic inequalities. Results supported hypotheses that the course would increase structural thinking about racial or ethnic inequality, and that structural thinking would generalize to inequalities not explicitly covered in the course. Both course content and active learning pedagogy were related to structural thinking about inequalities. Active learning was also related to applying structural thinking to targets of change. KEY WORDS: causal attribution, individualism, structural causation, intergroup relationsDiscussions about group inequalities in the United States, whether they take place in the popular press, the political arena, or the academic forum, often involve a debate about the capacity of individuals in different groups to determine their own socioeconomic success. Two opposing explanations typically characterize this debate. One attributes group differences in socioeconomic success to the character, motivation, and dispositions of individuals belonging to various groups. The other explanation, a structural one, asserts that institutions treat different groups of people unequally, making success less attainable for some groups than for others. The 305 0162-895X

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The authors propose a theoretical model of engaged learning for democracy and justice that draws from multicultural education and critical pedagogy, Freireian dialogic education, and Kolb's active, experiential learning. Engaged learning is defined as applying concepts and ideas from the classroom to out-of-class cognition and action. An empirical investigation (n ϭ 203) examines the impact of a course focusing on intergroup relations and social conflict. The course is shown to increase students' structural attributions for racial/ethnic inequality and socio-historical causation. The course also increases students' action orientation away from individual blaming to individual action toward institutional targets, and institutional and societal change. On pre-and post-test measures, engaged learning is shown to mediate the impact of course content and active pedagogy on students' active thinking and understanding of socio-historical causation as well as students' action strategies that promote more tolerance. On post-test only measures, engaged learning mediated effects on socio-structural understanding, understanding others, and learning about conflict. The authors discuss the importance of content, active pedagogy, and engaged learning, and implications for future research and practice on teaching about democracy and social justice.

Since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), social scientists have argued that education is important to change in racial attitudes given opportunities for interethnic contact. Students today are presented, also, with opportunities for interethnic learning through curriculum and extracurricular programming. The importance of contact, curriculum, and residence hall programs for the attitudes of first-year college students from three ethnic groups was examined. Students (n = 791) completed surveys at the beginning and end of the year. Regressions tested the relationships of these first-year experiences to intergroup attitudes (awareness of ethnic inequality, support for policies addressing ethnic inequality) at the end of the first year, controlling for initial attitudes and background. Contact and curriculum were related to attitudes for European American students.