Imagine walking into a classroom and seeing a sea of blank faces staring back at you. You start your lesson plan, but the students seem disinterested and unmotivated. After some time, you realize your students are not responding to your lesson because they simply cannot relate. The material is alien to them. This scenario is all too common in modern classrooms, especially as the demographics of our student population continue to shift. As teachers, we must learn to avoid bias in the classroom. How to avoid bias in the classroom is an important step in creating a fair, inclusive classroom where all students feel valued and have equal opportunities to succeed. Knowing how to provide feedback to students is also essential for fostering their growth, as feedback that is constructive and relevant helps them feel understood and supported. This article will offer valuable insights to help you achieve this goal.
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What is Educational Bias?
Bias occurs when we allow preconceived ideas relating to a person, a personal characteristic, or a group of people to influence how we think about, relate to, and interact with them. Bias can be negative or positive. It can make you favor someone or be prejudiced against them. For example, suppose you were at a social event and were introduced to someone wearing a T-shirt with your favorite band's logo.
You may view them more favorably than someone wearing a political party badge that does not align with your views. Biases can be based on many things, from someone’s external and physical appearance to how they express themselves or the people they are associated with.
Unconscious Bias: The Hidden Influencer
Unconscious or implicit bias refers to biases that we all hold without awareness. Our brains are designed to process information about people quickly and efficiently. This means we often make snap judgments about people informed by our background, experiences, and expectations, alongside cultural and social influences. These ‘first impressions’ can affect how we treat others, so it is important to understand unconscious bias as individuals and as educators.
What is Educational Bias?
Educational bias is when biases are at play in educational settings. This can occur at an organizational level or an individual level in terms of staff members’ own biases. Education bias can take the form of various biases (some of which we will look at later in this article). The bias could, for example, be based on assumptions and preconceptions relating to:
- Gender
- Race
- Ethnicity or cultural identity
- Religion
- Socio-economic status
- Special educational needs or disabilities
- Family associations
Examples of Bias in the Classroom
Instructors may assume that certain students know to seek help when struggling, although students at higher risk for struggling academically are often less likely to seek help and support. Instructors may assume that students from certain backgrounds or social groups have differing intellectual abilities and/or ambitions.
For example, an instructor might assume that students from a certain background will be satisfied with lower achievement levels. Instructors may expect students who speak with certain accents to be poor writers.
Challenging Stereotypes and Assumptions in the Classroom
Students with substandard writing abilities may be stereotyped as lacking intellectual ability. Instructors might treat students with physical disabilities as if they may also have mental disabilities and thus require more attention.
Students affiliated with a particular identity group may be treated as experts on issues related to that group. Instructors may assume that students will best relate to the historical, contemporary, or fictional character who resembles them demographically. Students of certain groups may be expected to have certain participation styles (quiet, argumentative, agenda-oriented).
The Consequences of Educational Bias
Like all biases, educational bias can lead to stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Schools have a legal duty to protect children from discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. The Act makes it unlawful for a school to discriminate against, harass, or victimize a pupil or potential pupil. This includes:
- About admissions.
- In the way that it provides education for pupils.
- It provides pupils access to any benefit, facility, or service.
- By excluding a pupil or subjecting them to any other detriment.
The Equality Act also protects those discriminated against through association or perception. For example, a pupil is discriminated against due to a parent’s sexual orientation or due to being perceived as following a particular religion. The Teachers’ standards state that teachers must:
- Set high expectations that inspire, motivate, and challenge all pupils.
- Promote good progress and outcomes by all pupils.
- Demonstrate consistently high standards of personal and professional conduct.
If educational bias goes unchecked or unchallenged, schools and teachers cannot fulfill their professional duties and obligations properly. We must actively promote equality, diversity, and inclusion in the classroom, so we must be aware of and actively avoid any educational bias, both conscious and unconscious.
Who Does Educational Bias Affect?
Educational bias can lead to certain children or groups of children:
- Being subject to lower expectations.
- Achieving lower academic outcomes.
- Having policies, such as behavior policies, applied inconsistently to them.
- Being more likely to be excluded from school.
- Experiencing discrimination within a school.
- Feeling undervalued and underrepresented within the school community.
- Becoming disengaged from education.
Key Types of Education Bias
This section will look at some key types of education bias. When considering any bias, it is important to acknowledge that most children’s experiences will be intersectional. For example, both a Black girl eligible for free school meals and a Gypsy Roma boy with SEND may be experiencing educational bias, but in different ways and with different biases at its root.
Gender Bias in Education
Gender bias can cause teachers and schools to treat genders differently, apply rules inconsistently, and cloud expectations. Because gendered expectations are prevalent in society, we may not notice inconsistencies and inequalities that might be present in our practice.
Examples of gender bias might include:
- Not offering the same sporting and extracurricular opportunities to all genders.
- Expecting children to play in different ways, for example, expecting boys to be more boisterous and perhaps sanctioning the same behavior in girls.
- Expecting girls to be neater in the presentation of their work or in terms of contributing to keeping the classroom tidier.
- Having different expectations regarding commitment to their studies, handing homework in, completing revision, etc.
- Explaining behavior that may constitute peer-on-peer abuse away with attitudes such as ‘girls this age are mean to each other’ or ‘boys will be boys’ and then not applying behavior policies rigorously or consistently enough.
- Calling on boys more for contributions in class. Psychologist David Sadker found that boys often raise their hands more animatedly and aggressively while girls wait patiently. This can lead to inequality in the opportunity to contribute. Indeed, this is one reason why a no-hand-raising policy can be beneficial, and other whole-class questioning techniques can be a fairer strategy in assessment for learning.
Statistics show a disparity in the academic performance of boys and girls, with girls consistently outperforming boys. For example, in the 2020/2021 academic year, 55.8% of girls achieved a grade 5 or above in GCSE English and maths compared to 48.2% of boys. In 2022, the ONS reported that the gender pay gap was 8.3% for full-time employees, indicating that girls’ academic advantage is not translating to the employment market.
Racial and Ethnic Bias in Education
Education bias can also be based on assumptions and preconceived ideas (both conscious and unconscious) regarding a person’s race or ethnicity. The Department for Education (DfE) publishes data on education outcomes broken down into ethnic groups.
Amongst others, this shows the following disparities:
- 83.8% of pupils from the Chinese ethnic group got a grade 5 or above, the highest percentage among all ethnic groups.
- White Gypsy and Roma pupils (9.1%) were least likely to get a grade 5 or above, followed by travelers of Irish heritage pupils (21.1%) and Black Caribbean pupils (35.9%).
- White Gypsy and Roma pupils had the highest permanent exclusion rates in the 2020 to 2021 school year (18 exclusions per 10,000 pupils).
Some of how racial or ethnic bias in education might manifest include:
- Policies that disadvantage certain groups. For example, dress codes with guidelines for acceptable ‘neat’ hair can inadvertently discriminate. A YMCA report found that 7 out of 10 young Black people felt pressured to change their hair to appear more professional.
- Safeguarding and child protection duties need to be properly fulfilled due to adultification bias, where certain children are not afforded the same notions of vulnerability and risk as others. (Although this is not exclusively linked to race, there is a strong link. Read our article, What is Adultification within Child Protection and Safeguarding?)
- Viewing children from certain backgrounds as more aggressive and applying behavior policies inconsistently. This can also be linked to adultification bias, where certain children are seen as more responsible. The same YMCA report found that 50% of young black people thought the biggest barrier to attaining success in school was their teachers’ perceptions of them.
- Assuming that children with certain accents or English as a second language should be placed in lower attainment groups or sets.
- Assuming cultural expertise, for example, requires a child to talk about a specific religious festival when they have not expressed interest in doing so and might not celebrate it.
Socio-Economic Bias in Education
A 2022 study published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology gave teachers identical work to mark. The work was attributed to either a child of lower or higher socio-economic status. The results found that teachers gave lower marks to the work they believed came from a pupil of lower socio-economic status.
This suggests that educational bias could partly be responsible for those children achieving lower academic outcomes. DfE data shows that in 2020/2021, pupils eligible for free school meals were less likely to get a grade 5 or above at GCSE than those who were not eligible. This was across all ethnic groups and genders. Examples of socio-economic bias in the classroom might include:
- Placing children from lower socio-economic backgrounds, or those eligible for free school meals, in lower attainment groups.
- Assuming that lower socio-economic status equates to children having less cultural capital.
- Assuming that children from lower socio-economic backgrounds will have less parental support, involvement, or investment in education.
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How to Avoid Bias in the Classroom
Lean Into the Uneasy Truth of Bias
Unconscious bias is uncomfortable, but that doesn’t make it less real or harmful. The first step to countering bias in the classroom is acknowledging its existence, which can be painful. Everyone has biases, and even the best-intentioned people can let these biases influence their behavior.
Reflect on your perspectives and how they may impact your students. For example, if you know that you have a bias against a particular group, actively work to counter this bias by researching the group’s culture and reaching out to students from this community to understand their individual experiences and perspectives better.
Seek Out Diverse Experiences and Perspectives
One way to minimize bias in the classroom is to spend time with diverse populations outside of school. Try to get to know people different from you and listen to their stories. Opening yourself up to their experiences can help you better understand their culture and the challenges they may face. Consider inviting diverse guests into your classroom to share their perspectives with your students.
Use Intercultural Communication Techniques
As classrooms become more diverse, students will likely bring different cultural norms to school. This may create misunderstandings that can negatively impact student performance and well-being.
Intercultural communication techniques should be applied to promote understanding and harmony to ease the transition for both students and educators. The first step is to inquire about different cultural practices. Frame these practices within the context of the students’ backgrounds. Dialogue between students and the class should be created to promote understanding.
Design Inclusive Curricula and Courses
All students bring unique backgrounds and experiences to the classroom that shape their learning. Teachers must develop inclusive curricula and assignments that acknowledge and reflect this diversity. Universal Design for Learning is a useful framework for creating inclusive class materials.
The approach emphasizes three core principles:
- Engagement – why we learn
- Representation – what we learn
- Action and expression – how we learn.
Assess Coursework and Exams with Caution
Stay aware of possible expectations and status quo biases that may limit responsiveness to new ideas and alternative ways to construct and share knowledge. Teachers can help reduce teacher-student expectation gaps around course assessment by making the assessment criteria explicit and accessible to all students. Checklists and rubrics can help reduce the expectations gap, especially when co-constructed by the teacher and students.
Representation Matters
Being able to see elements of your own identity positively reflected in the school setting can be powerful in terms of creating a culture of inclusion. The more truly inclusive the culture is, the less likely educational bias is. To maximize representation, audit your teaching and learning resources, as well as class and school displays, to ensure that you provide a representation of diversity and not perpetuate stereotypes.
Work to Increase Empathy and Empathic Communication
Empathy, the ability to understand another’s perspective and emotions, is important in all human social encounters, including teaching. Often, teachers have little understanding of the communities where their students live and have trouble understanding their perspectives, leading them to treat these students more harshly.
One solution: learning about students' lives and showing that you care.
Transparent Marking
You can take some steps to ensure that bias does not influence your marking and assessment. When setting pieces of work, it can be useful to provide a clear marking structure to students, detailing what you are looking for when you mark them. This helps them structure their work, but you can then use this during marking, meaning every piece is considered against the same clear criteria.
Develop Cross-Group Friendships in Their Own Lives
While taking steps in the classroom is important, the relationships we form outside can also impact bias. Cross-group friendships have been shown in several studies to decrease stress in intergroup situations, to decrease prejudice toward outgroup members, and to decrease one’s preference for social hierarchy or domination over lower-status groups.
Be the Change
Even taking the smallest steps toward countering unconscious bias can make a big difference. Educators should learn to pronounce international students’ given names, for example, and ask for their help when needed. Wick uses a technique called Pair Share to expand equity in the classroom. The method enables each student to reflect on class topics with a partner. Then, each group shares their insights with the entire classroom.
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- How to Keep Students Engaged in the Classroom
Can Artificial Intelligence Help Mitigate Bias in the Classroom?
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AI can help reduce classroom bias by offering data-driven insights into student achievement. By analyzing diverse data types, AI tools can detect patterns that reveal hidden biases, allowing educators to see where they may be unfairly grading or treating students differently based on race, gender, culture, or other personal factors.
These objective insights can help eliminate assumptions that can lead to inequitable outcomes in the classroom. In a recent article for EdSurge, a computer science professor shared how his research revealed that teachers hold bias when grading students’ work. “As an educator, I’ve always believed that I was unbiased,” he wrote. “But this research has shown me that AI is not only more accurate than humans at assessing student work, but it can also help identify the biases that I, and other educators, might hold. This can lead to better outcomes for all students.”
AI Personalizes Learning to Meet Individual Needs
AI can also reduce bias in the classroom by personalizing learning to meet the unique needs of individual students. This helps eliminate the assumptions that can lead to inequitable outcomes. “When we talk about bias in education, a lot of it comes from generalized assumptions that certain groups of students will perform a certain way,” says David Louie, co-founder of the AI EdTech company GradeScope.
“AI can help eliminate those assumptions by better understanding individual student needs and providing targeted supports to help them succeed,” says Louie. “As a result, students can demonstrate their knowledge and abilities without the undue influence of bias.”
AI is Not Immune to Bias
While AI can be an invaluable tool for reducing biases in education, it’s important to note that these technologies are not immune to bias. Humans develop AI systems, and if biases are present in the data used to train algorithms, those biases will carry over into the AI. For this reason, it’s crucial to ensure that educators and institutions carefully monitor AI systems to ensure equitable outcomes for all students.
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