By: Yasemin Copur-Gencturk, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Teacher Education, University of Southern California; Joseph R. Cimpian, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Economics and Education Policy, New York University; Sarah Theule Lubienski, Ph.D., Professor, Mathematics Education; Associate Dean, School of Education, Indiana University Bloomington; Ian Thacker, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Southern California
May 27, 2020
There are troubling, persistent achievement gaps among students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds in the United States. In addition, women and people of color are underrepresented in STEM-related fields, which contributes to the wealth and wage inequity in our society. Cultural stereotypes, for example, that mathematics requires natural ability or that certain groups have more mathematical ability than others, likely contribute to these issues, but it is not clear how.
Students might receive these stereotypical messages from multiple sources, such as their parents, peers, or teachers. Yet teachers’ unconscious biases that have been shaped by cultural stereotypes have important negative consequences for students’ academic outcomes. These implicit biases operate beneath teachers’ awareness and can have subtle but lasting impacts on students. For example, teachers’ implicit biases can shape their expectations of students, which may lead to racial gaps in their students’ academic achievement (van den Bergh, Denessen, Hornstra, Voeten, & Holland, 2010). Such biases can also affect teachers’ tracking decisions when placing girls and boys in advanced mathematics classes (Nurnberger, Nerb, Schmitz, Keller, & Sutterlin, 2016). In this way, teachers’ implicit biases can feed into a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein teachers’ biased perceptions of their students’ cognitive abilities shape their instructional decisions and academic expectations of their students, which in turn, influence their students’ self-concept and academic performance (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968).
Thus, an important question needs to be answered: To what extent are teachers’ evaluations of students’ performance or their perceptions of students’ ability shaped by their unconscious biases?
Read more:
https://aaas-arise.org/2020/05/27/unconscious-bias-in-the-classroom-how-cultural-stereotypes-affect-teachers-assessment-of-students-math-abilities/