Next week we shall start the core weeks and we are all (I hope) excited to see what kind of activities the participants will come up with!

Today, I’d like to talk about one topic that came up during our class discussions. We were discussing the chapter of How Learning works on Student Development and Course Climate when the theme of stereotype showed up; indeed, mathematics is a field, with the other “hard” sciences and to some extend engineering, where stereotypes are pretty strong.

Even though this is nothing new this problem is still pretty hard to address; indeed, as illustrated in this recent study, faculty are sometimes unconsciously biased against certain category of students/people. Moreover students can also underperform due to what is called stereotype threat, the idea that they belong to a group that is not good at a given task. Here again, this can be an unconscious process and it is sometimes triggered in very subtle and by apparently insignificant actions.

During this discussion, two main views emerged: either talk about it in class in order to prevent such a threat to happen or be aware of it and act accordingly, namely, by being as impartial as possible but without directly talking about it with the students. The idea of talking about a possible stereotype threat is partially supported by this study, where students tended to perform the same when informed about the potential stereotype threat. One concern about this approach is that it could backfire and in the end have the opposite effect; this question remains open at the moment. Regarding the second view, acting as impartially as possible, this is of course desirable, and teachers should always do their best to act so.The difficulty here is that favoritism can be unconscious and thus pretty hard to control. As the first study mentioned above indicates, even people who think they are acting impartially can be biased. The question is then to know whether having measure specifically for that such as only having a number and no names on homework and midterms is useful and/or easy enough to set up. One could argue that just the handwriting give some information that could then lead to some unconscious favoritism. These last hypotheses remain to be tested.

As one would have guessed, there seems to be no miracle solution to stereotype threat. Hence, acting in good faith and being as impartial as possible seems to be the best one can do.