7 Reducing the impact of implicit biases in your classroom
It is important to mitigate implicit biases, generalizations, and tokenism when considering students’ diverse social identities. Implicit biases are attitudes based on prejudices and stereotypes without intention or awareness. These unexamined assumptions about your students can affect grading, classroom interaction, participation, letters of recommendation, and more. Here are some evidence-based strategies you can employ to become more aware of your implicit biases and reduce their impact:
- Engage with the Implicit Association Test that might help you identify and examine your implicit biases to monitor them more closely.
- Assign and shuffle groups intentionally, aiming for heterogeneous groups. At the same time, avoid having students be the only member of their social identity groups; for example, try to put two women together in a group with three men in a mostly male classroom.
- In discussions, avoid situations where a student seems to speak for their entire social group, being their “representative.” Avoid tokenism (Dasgupta, 2011; Meadows & Sekaquaptewa, 2013).
- If possible, practice anonymous grading, masking students’ race, gender, or other group membership (ICON provides an option for anonymous grading). For paper submissions or written exams, consider asking students to put their names only on the last page of a submission.
- To minimize the impact of implicit biases on your grading, you could also use transparent and detailed rubrics (adapted to align with the goals of your assignment) and share them with your students as criteria for success (see the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ VALUE rubrics).
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