Inclusive Classrooms and Equitable Student Success: A Faculty Experiment

Researchers have documented racial and gender gaps in college enrollment decisions, choice of major, degree attainment, and earnings—despite narrowing gaps in test scores and course-taking in K-12 settings. Implicit racial and gender stereotypes of faculty members may affect their interactions with students and exacerbate these gaps, even without awareness or intent to harm members of underrepresented groups. Yet, there is no causal evidence on the extent to which faculty’s implicit bias contributes to these educational disparities and which types of interventions are cost-effective in mitigating any harmful effects of implicit bias on student achievement gaps.This study aims to address implicit bias of faculty members through the collaboration between psychologists and economists. First, we plan to understand the relationship between faculty’s implicit bias and gaps in student achievement, completion, and economic mobility using a newly constructed dataset with schools’ student-level and faculty-level administrative data, and faculty’s implicit association test (IAT) results. Second, we plan to implement a randomized field experiment to evaluate the effects of faculty implicit bias trainings on students' academic performance and attitudes through a semester-long pilot in spring 2020 at Portland Community College.