Empathy Intervention to Reduce Implicit Bias in Pre-Service Teachers

Abstract

There have been long-term concerns regarding discriminatory discipline practices used with culturally and linguistically diverse students, with little research on the impact teacher-centered empathy interventions may have on this population. This randomized pretest-posttest control group design investigates the ability of a brief empathy-inducing intervention to improve the implicit bias of pre-service teachers, as measured by the Implicit Association Test. We found the empathy intervention statistically significant at decreasing the implicit bias of White female pre-service teachers toward Black individuals ( F = 7.55, η = 0.22, p = 0.01). Implications and future research are discussed, including extended intervention periods.

Recognitive Justice and Educational Inequalities: An Intersectional Approach Involving Secondary Grade School Students in Greece

“…Furthermore, teachers' empathy creates positive conditions for inclusive teaching and communication in the classroom, as well as contributing to the weakening of prejudices against students from minority groups. This is particularly important for the recognition of cultural differences in school [36].…”

The Implicit Association Test in health professions education: A meta-narrative review

“…The IAT was used to measure several different types of bias including biases related to race [38, 40–43, 52–54, 57], age [46, 50], mental illness [37, 45, 47, 51, 56, 58], weight [36, 49, 55], disability [42, 44], gender [48], and others [39]. The IAT was also used to measure the effectiveness of several types of educational activities including experiential learning, didactics, videos, independent-learning, social-contact and small/large group discussion.…”

“…Similarly, Omori used the IAT to measure bias before and after contact with schizophrenia patients, finding some changes in IAT results after their intervention [51]. Out of the articles that used the IAT as a metric and used a pre-post design, only 5 demonstrated a significant change in implicit attitudes after the intervention [38, 40, 46, 49, 57], while 10 clearly demonstrated no significant changes [44, 45, 47, 50–54, 56, 58]. Other papers used the IAT to measure bias in association with educational interventions, however, did not use a pre- and post-design.…”

Resilience-promoting policies and contexts for children of color in the United States: Existing research and future priorities

“…As another example, in a randomized trial with middle-school math teachers ( n = 31 teachers, n = 1682 students), an empathy-focused intervention designed to address implicit bias reduced suspension rates from 9.6% to 4.8% over the course of one year (Okonofua, Paunesku, & Walton, 2016). Similarly, in a randomized trial of 34 White female pre-service teachers, an empathy-focused intervention to improve implicit bias (as measured by the Implicit Association Test) led to a decline in implicit bias towards Black individuals (Whitford & Emerson, 2019); however, future research is needed to establish how this type of change in implicit bias leads to a meaningful decline in discriminatory behavior towards children, or to increased support for progressive policies.…”