Our experiment suggests teachers are identifying Black students as potentially having disabilities more often than white students who produced the same answers to math problems. Further, girls are not being given equal chances to be placed in gifted programs even when they give answers identical to those given by boys.
OK, so stereotypes have power for teachers. In all the testing we do we do find black boys and girls generally doing less well in maths. So, that’s a fact about life which will create the stereotype in the minds of the teachers.
And?
Their next experiment will suggest that teachers are slow to identify black students with disabilities because they fear being labelled as racist.
It’s a study; there is no ‘and’. We call it ‘academic’ for a reason.
“who produced the same answers to math problems”
Have these buggers ever taught clever people? The bright ones give right answers far more quickly than the less bright. Just getting it right is an inadequate measure of ability. That is why exams have a fixed length and lots of questions.
I knew an undergraduate who took a tough maths exam where the examiners had reckoned the best student might get five problems out in thee hours. My pal got eight out. Result: awarded a mark of 160% (only mathematicians would have the self-confidence to do that) and the class medal.
It be dey kulchor.
Hard to say it’s racist, because inner city schools overwhelmingly employ black teachers, because white teachers neither understand how to deal with black kids, nor can deal with the associated chaos and violence.
It’s much more likely that for an equal scoring girl and boy that the boy did it on the back of zero study, while the girl did hours of work. Stereotypes, of course, but most commonly so.
Or the boy showed genuine insight, but lays out his work like a deranged chimp, whereas the girl has followed instructions to the letter, but her layout was immaculate. That’s so typical to pass well beyond stereotype.
Finally for gifted programs, which I select every year, you an absolute idiot to select on grades. You need students who *want* to be given questions they can’t answer. Not everyone likes that. Many girls, in particular, get quite upset when faced with question after question that they cannot do, as will many boys.
Finally, this is a reason for anonymous exams. The whole problem is avoided if the gender and race of the student is unknown. Yet those complaining about this will also be against formal exams and testing. So they can suck the consequences.
I’ve never been able to see the difference between a stereotype and an inductive generalisation that someone objects to.
Richards Heuer was one of the folk who gave us the term “heuristic” for mental rules of thumb to quickly sort and process. Not always right, but that takes you to the “thinking fast and slow” decisions and planning.
I’d recommend his (weighty, but available free from the CIA website) work “The psychology of intelligence analysis” as an early version of what everyone from Sir Pterry to Richard Dawkins have tried to explain – heuristics exist for a reason, even if the world has changed (we used to bolt for safety from ripples in long grass that might be a hungry predator, now we imagine ghosts where the curtains rustle)
“for mental rules of thumb to quickly sort and process. Not always right, but that takes you to the “thinking fast and slow” decisions and planning.”
That’s basically what our picture of the world is built up from. Not what is there, but what we interpret as being there. And the interpretation is based on previous experience. So everybody’s world looks a little different from a personal perspective.
The “fast or slow” depends how much of that past experience one accesses. Quick is a rapid closest fit, usually good enough for purpose. Even if one goes on to do the slow & thoughtful, the closest best fit will have preceded it. That’s really what “unconcious racism” training is all about. Trying to replace the quick access best fit with a more “appropriate” response. Brain washing, if you like.
Is this one of the things you chaps had in mind?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0141033576
If so it might be wise to visit the literature to see how many of the results he discussed proved “not replicable” (as the euphemism is).
https://replicationindex.com/category/thinking-fast-and-slow/
Interestingly, reading the actual paper, there were no differences between recommendations to gifted programs by race, only gender. And as far as I can tell (the results are classic modern science gibberish) the differences are extremely small. Teachers were given a very small number of problems to judge on, so it’s no surprise that there’s a slight bias in favour of boys and a slight discrimination against blacks – insufficient data leads to more reliance on stereotypes, as plenty of real-world examples have shown. The research is pretty poor really: if you want to analyse potential bias, you have to replicate the full process, not use a very truncated process and then claim the results are the same.