Teachers Implicit Bias Negatively Affects Student Achievement

Teachers’ Implicit Bias Negatively Affects Student Achievement
Rebecca Burke
The College of New Jersey

Teachers’ Implicit Bias Negatively Affects Student Achievement
The racial and ethnic achievement gap is an alarming issue that needs to be addressed in the United States educational system. When students experience explicit racial discrimination their achievement on academic tasks are lower (A Class Divided, 2003). This poor academic achievement can lead to higher referral for psychological evaluation and placement in special education (Chang, D. F., & Sue, S., 2003).Teachers’ biases can be responsible for this poor academic achievement. According to a study, teachers tend to rate African American students lower on
It will be argued that teachers tend to favor Caucasian students and will be implicitly biased towards African American students. This implicit bias will create a threatening environment for African American academic student achievement. In order to test this theory, already existing student achievement, motivation, and problem behaviors will be controlled for and considered in the final measurements. The research question that is being proposed is that if African American students experience implicit bias from their teacher will their academic achievement be lower than their Caucasian peers? By answering this research question future research can be conducted to control teachers’ implicit bias in the classroom setting in order to close the academic achievement gap. The hypothesis being proposed is that teachers who are more implicitly biased will have a negative effect on African American student
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