Experimental Evidence on Teachers’ Racial Bias in Student Evaluation: The Role of Grading Scales

By David M. Quinn. 2020

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A vast research literature documents racial bias in teachers’ evaluations of students. Theory suggests bias may be larger on grading scales with vague or overly general criteria versus scales with clearly specified criteria, raising the possibility that well-designed grading policies may mitigate bias. This study offers relevant evidence through a randomized Web-based experiment with 1,549 teachers. On a vague grade-level evaluation scale, teachers rated a student writing sample lower when it was randomly signaled to have a Black author, versus a White author. However, there was no evidence of racial bias when teachers used a rubric with more clearly defined evaluation criteria. Contrary to expectation, I found no evidence that the magnitude of grading bias depends on teachers’ implicit or explicit racial attitudes.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2464f353788fe73ad3a37ba94bc5008535275dd

Citations in the corpus

• Tackling Educational Inequalities with Social Psychology: Identities, Contexts, and Interventions (2020, unknown): “Teachers, with support from school leaders, can reduce the impact of bias in academic assessment by using clearly defined and objective evaluation criteria (Quinn, 2020).”