Teachers are less critical when marking minority students versus white students, a new U.S. study has found – suggesting that by setting a lower standard than the one they have for the rest of the class also leads to lower academic performance.
In the study, published online in the Journal of Educational Psychology, researchers at Rutgers-Newark University gave 113 white middle and high school teachers in two public schools a set of essays. (One school was middle class and white, the other lower class and more diverse.) The teachers believed some essays were written by white students, and others by Latino students.
The study found that teachers were more effusive with their praise and less critical if they believed the paper was by a Latino student.
As lead research Kent Harber told the Atlantic this is called "positive feedback bias" – though it has negative consequences. That is students see through false praise pretty quickly, assume their teacher thinks that's the best they can do, and don't challenge themselves to improve.
"What happens is that when the feedback is inaccurate, it doesn't provide a valid fix as to where a student is actually performing," Dr. Harber said. "They don't know where to direct their best efforts. It's like having a biased compass."
In fact, Dr. Harber suggested, when minority students are aware of this pattern, receiving an easier mark hurts their self-esteem, rather than raising it. (The Atlantic also points to a result called "stereotype threat" – when minority students get the message that their racial group doesn't perform as well in general on standardized test, they actually perform less well in the testing.)
The paper tried to pinpoint what was behind the teachers' behaviour and suggest that teachers were, even unconsciously, trying to preserve "a self-image of being unbiased."
The solution to the problem, Dr. Harber said, is for teachers to feel secure in their jobs. Teachers who felt less threatened in their position (and presumably believed they had the support of the administration) were less likely to demonstrate bias in their marking – they could focus more on how best to help their students.
Have you ever felt your child experienced teacher bias at school?