Same Idea,Shifting Standards: An Experimental Study of Racial-Ethnic Biases in Responsive Math Teaching

Abstract

Background:

Teacher expectations and judgments about student capabilities are predictive of student achievement, yet such judgments may be influenced by salient dimensions of student identity and invite biases. Moreover, responsive teaching in mathematics may also invite teacher biases due to the emphasis on student-generated inputs and ideas. Although prior experimental work has demonstrated teacher biases against racially minoritized learners in the context of incorrect or partially correct student mathematical work, less is known about the potential for biases to emerge when teachers are presented with students’ correct and nonstandard mathematical ideas.

Focus of Study:

In this preregistered experiment, we investigate teacher biases in (a) expectations and judgments about student capabilities in math and (b) teacher responsiveness to students’ mathematical thinking.

Research Design:

Through a between-subjects design via an online survey, we randomly assigned N = 312 teachers to a simulated classroom composed of predominantly Black, Latinx/e, or White students and prompted them to respond to six vignettes featuring correct and nonstandard student solutions to mathematics problems. Teachers’ responses to each vignette were recorded, transcribed, and coded. We also prompted teachers to judge the quality of the students’ mathematical thinking and rate their expectations about the difficulty of the problems for a typical student. Finally, we ran a series of regressions on our outcomes of interest to understand how teachers’ responses to and thinking about student work in the vignettes might systematically vary depending on student race-ethnicity.

Conclusions:

Our findings show teachers expected greater task difficulty in both the Latinx/e and Black classroom conditions relative to the White. We did not find significant differences by condition in other dimensions, although we found trend-level evidence to suggest that teachers may be more likely to support student sense-making and provide more positive, substantive affirmations to Black students relative to White students for the same mathematical solution. Our findings have implications for research and teacher training in reform-oriented mathematics instruction.