Teachers Give Negative Feedback To Students Of Color

Black and Latino students may be getting less critical, but helpful, feedback from teachers than their white counterparts, a new educational study indicates.

"The social implications of these results are important; many minority students might not be getting input from instructors thatstimulates intellectual growth and fosters achievement," study researcher Kent Harber, a Rutgers-Newark psychology professor, said in a press release.

This positive bias in feedback to minority students may be contributing to the achievement gap between white and minority students, a stubborn national problem, Harber said.

The study "tested" 113 white middle-school and high-school teachers in two public school districts, one middle class and white, and the other working class and racially mixed. Both are located in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area.

Harber and colleagues developed a poorly written essay that they gave to the teachers to grade, under the pretense that it was the work of a student. In some cases, the teachers believed the student was white, in others black and in others Latino.

The teachers believed their feedback would go directly to the student.

The researchers found that, indeed, the teachers were prone to give more praise and less criticism if they believed a minority student had written the paper, as opposed to a white student.

Sourcehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/06/positive-bias-minority-students_n_1489792.html?ir=Black%20Voices&ref=black-voices

Now We Are Born Racist, WTF.

Adults have more difficulty recognizing faces that belong to people of another race, and this deficit appears to start early.

New research indicates that by the time they are 9 months old, babies are better ableto recognize faces and emotional expressions of people who belong to the group they interact with most, than they are those of people who belong to another race.

Babies don't start out this way; younger infants appear equally able to tell people apart, regardless of race.

"These results suggest that biases in face recognition and perception begin in preverbal infants, well before concepts about race are formed. It is important for us to understand the nature of these biases in order to reduce or eliminate [the biases]," said study researcher Lisa Scott, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in a statement. [3-Year-Olds Fancy Own Ethnic Group]

In the study, 48 Caucasian infants were given the task of differentiating between faces of their own race and faces that belonged to another, unfamiliar, race. In another experiment, sensors placed on the babies' heads detected brain activity when the babies saw images of faces of Caucasian or African-American races expressing emotions that either matched or did not match sounds they heard, such as laughing and crying.

While 5-month-olds were equally able to distinguish faces from different races, 9-month-olds fared better with their own race. Likewise, brain-activity measurements showed the 9-month-olds processed emotional expressions among Caucasian faces differently than those of African-American faces, while the 5-month-olds did not.

Source http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/04/racist-babies-nine-month-olds-bias-faces_n_1477937.html?ir=Black%20Voices&ref=black-voices

Now White Doctors Are Caring Less For Their Black Patients

The average time most doctors spend with their patients during each visit is just 20 minutes, according to 2009 estimates by the National Center for Health Statistics. And a survey last year by health care consultant group Press Ganey determined that before patients even get in to see a doctor, they've waited an average of 23 minutes.

But while health care professionals have offered advice on how to minimize waits andhow to make the most of your one-on-one time with a doctor, few have ever addressed a hurdle that many black patients may face -- racial bias.

In a study published in a March issue of the American Journal of Public Health, researchers found that two-thirds of doctors harbored "unconscious" racial biases toward patients. When those biases were present, researchers found that doctors tended to dominate conversations with African-American patients, pay less attention to their personal and psychosocial needs and make patients feel less involved in making decisions about their health.

"It's been really extensively shown that minorities don't receive the same quality of health care as whites in the United States," said Lisa A. Cooper, M.D., M.P.H., a professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "I've been interested in the extent to which that is accounted for by the fact that a lot of minorities see physicians who are different from them culturally and racially, and that there might be some problems with cultural misunderstandings or miscommunication.

Source http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/racial-bias-doctors_n_1472281.html?ref=mostpopular