Experimental evidence of disparities in biology teachers’ responses to student writing

ABSTRACT

Writing activities can function as powerful teaching tools in science education – but are their benefits realised equitably? The answer may depend in part on how teachers interpret and respond to student writing in light of societal stereotypes that link scientific competence, linguistic competence, and racial, ethnic, or gender identity. In this experiment, high school biology teachers (n = 70) in a U.S. state evaluated and gave feedback on a purported student writing sample. No main effect of student writer’s racialised/gendered identity was found; however, non-Hispanic White teachers gave lower ratings when the writing sample was attributed to a Latina female student rather than a non-Hispanic White male student. The reverse pattern was apparent in the ratings of Hispanic teachers and other teachers of colour. All teachers wrote generally similar feedback, but non-Hispanic teachers of colour and White teachers wrote shorter feedback to a Latina student when ‘her’ score was low, a relationship which did not appear in feedback written to a non-Hispanic White male student. Although most of these disparities did not exhibit statistical significance, many effect sizes were relatively large and may merit further study. Practical implications for equity in science education are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• gender bias
• racial bias
• science writing

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Dr. Arnetha Ball, Dr. Bryan Brown, Dr. Ramón Martínez, and Dr. John Rickford for their invaluable support and feedback on the design of this study and the revision of the manuscript. I would also like to thank Dr. Jonathan Osborne, Dr. Rachel Lotan, and Dr. Jonathan Rosa for their intellectual support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Student mastery of vocabulary terms is widely seen as an important goal of K-12 science instruction, particularly in biology instruction (Groves, 1995; Merzyn, 1987; Yager, 1983). Thus, if inconsistencies do occur in teacher evaluations of student writing, texts which paraphrase key vocabulary may be especially likely to elicit such inconsistencies. At the same time, there are also strong rationales for sometimes asking students to talk and write about science in their own words (Brown & Kloser, 2009; Brown et al., 2010). Thus, the text used in this study has characteristics that are potentially pedagogically valuable, and which also have the potential to elicit the types of inequities being studied.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Diversity Dissertation Research Opportunity Grant from the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education at Stanford University.