Study: Future Teachers Are Already Biased Against Black Children

[Judi Lynn]

Ed Cara
54 minutes ago

That black school children are treated more harshly than white children by teachers is no secret, as plenty of studies and painful anecdotes have repeatedly shown. But some recent research published in the journal Contemporary Educational Psychology suggests an even more discouraging reality: The incoming generation of teachers shows bias against black kids, too.

Researchers at North Carolina State University and elsewhere recruited 40 college students (most of whom were white) who were training to become teachers. They asked the volunteers to look at pictures of 20 black and white men and women, and then to identify one of five emotions the actors were showing (happiness, anger, surprise, sadness, or fear). A previous experiment by the researchers used 20 human volunteers and facial recognition software to pinpoint the emotion shown in each photo.

For a separate test, the volunteers watched four videos depicting a black and white boy in elementary school. One pair of videos had the boys doing something that could be seen as callous, with the black boy stepping on someone’s homework with muddy shoes and the white boy walking away with someone else’s handheld video game. The other two videos featured actions more likely to be seen as unintentionally insensitive: the black boy made a possibly rude comment about another student’s work, and the white boy put someone else’s work in the trash while cleaning up. For all the videos, the volunteers were asked to rate how hostile the boy was on a scale from one to five.

In the photo task, the volunteers were consistently worse at guessing the emotions of both black men and women. Overall, black faces were more than twice as likely to be misread than white faces. And when it came to anger, the misreading was even worse. Black faces were four times as likely to be mistakenly seen as angry.

More:
https://gizmodo.com/study-future-teachers-are-already-biased-against-black-1827298437