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The feedback withholding bias: Minority students do not receive critical feedback from evaluators concerned about appearing racist

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Abstract

How can we learn from our mistakes if we're unaware they exist? The present research tested the hypothesis that minority students receive less critical feedback on their written work from evaluators who are primarily externally motivated to inhibit their racial biases. Participants highlighted instances of good/bad writing in essays purportedly written by a White or a minority student. Results of two experiments showed that although participants provided equivalent amounts of positive feedback to both authors, they provided less negative feedback and gave higher grades to minority authors to the extent that they were externally but not internally motivated to respond without prejudice. This finding reveals that stigmatized students sometimes fail to receive the critical feedback necessary to identify areas needing improvement, particularly when evaluators are concerned about appearing prejudiced. The implications for educational equality are discussed.

Highlights

► Comparison of feedback and grades given to minority versus White student essays ► Evaluators gave less criticism to Black than to White student authors. ► Motives to control bias predicted withholding criticism from minority student. ► Motives to control bias predicted inflated grade percent for minority student. ► Praise given did not differ and was not predicted by motives of evaluators.

Introduction

The feedback people receive can have a profound effect on what they learn (Walberg, 1984), making the accuracy of that feedback essential. The present research tested the hypothesis that minority students might not always receive ample critical feedback on their work and tested possible reasons for this feedback withholding bias.

At first glance, we might expect evaluators to be overly negative in their feedback to minority students. When negative stereotypes are activated, they represent hypotheses about students' abilities that can lead to less favorable perceptions of ambiguous performance, particularly when evaluators are under time pressure or lack the ability to monitor or control their biases (Darley and Gross, 1983, Jussim et al., 1996, Kruglanski and Freund, 1983). Such research leads to an intuitive prediction that majority group evaluators might provide negatively biased feedback to minority compared to majority students; however, there are reasons to expect that minority students sometimes receive overly positive feedback.

In contrast to the above studies in which evaluators believe their evaluations will remain anonymous, other research suggests that when evaluators believe their feedback will be communicated to students, they provide more praise to minority than White students (Harber, 1998, Harber, 2004, Harber et al., 2010). Majority-group evaluators write overly positive summaries of essays written by minority students (Harber, 1998) and are reluctant to notify minority students when their academic workload might be too onerous to handle (Crosby & Monin, 2007). Furthermore, when evaluators set a lower standard of success for stigmatized students, they perceive the mediocre work of minority students in a more positive light than work of the same caliber completed by White students (Biernat & Manis, 1994).

The above research points to a positivity bias in the approach evaluators take when directly advising stigmatized students, but there are gaps in what we know about this phenomenon. First, the above studies have measured gestalt appraisals rather than flagging specific errors and ambiguities for revision. Does this optimistic appraisal imply that evaluators try harder to find the positive in students' work, or do they refrain from pointing out the negative, which could impair later learning? Secondly, we do not fully understand what motivates this bias. Does it stem from a well-intentioned yet patronizing attempt to protect disadvantaged students from feedback that could be demotivating or from a self-interested concern with avoiding any appearance of prejudice?

Research has demonstrated the ways in which overly negative feedback can lead to mistrust and disengagement among minority students (Cohen, Steele, & Ross, 1999) but, on the other hand, the deliberate withholding of criticism is likely to come at a cost to learning. For example, being a target of a negative stereotype cues a motivation to detect, correct and prevent errors as a means to disconfirm that stereotype (Forbes et al., 2008, Jamieson and Harkins, 2007, Keller and Bless, 2008). Ironically, the very feedback that minority students might most be searching for and motivated to learn from could be systematically withheld from them. Thus, the first goal of the current research was to identify whether evaluators seek to overemphasize the positive aspects of minority student work (an inflation bias), and/or if they refrain from addressing errors (a feedback withholding bias).

We expected to see evidence of a feedback withholding bias for two reasons. First, evaluators might intuit that negative feedback would be demotivating for students from disadvantaged educational backgrounds. Taking this other-focused but patronizing perspective, evaluators seek to protect vulnerable students by rewarding positive effort rather than penalizing mistakes. Second, evaluators might underreport negative feedback out of a self-focused concern with avoiding the appearance of bias (Shelton, Richeson, & Vorauer, 2006). If evaluators believe that any criticism they provide could be interpreted as racial bias, they might be reluctant to highlight the negative and instead overemphasize the positive in their feedback (Cohen & Steele, 2002). Supporting this idea, evaluators provide feedback that is less positively biased if they are first affirmed in their egalitarian values and are held accountable for the feedback they give (Harber et al., 2010, Ruscher et al., 2010). However, past research has neither identified individual differences that make evaluators more or less likely to show these biases nor has it linked concerns with appearing prejudiced to withholding negative feedback specifically.

We hypothesized that concerns about appearing racist should be most salient to those who are motivated primarily by extrinsic reasons to regulate their biases, operationalized as those low in internal motivation (IMS) but high in external motivation (EMS) to respond without prejudice in race-relevant contexts (Plant and Devine, 1998, Plant and Devine, 2009). These individuals adhere to social norms to refrain from revealing biases, but have not internalized egalitarian goals (Butz & Plant, 2009). Individuals with this compliant motivation endorse negative biases in private, but report less prejudice in public (Butz & Plant, 2009; see also Dunton & Fazio, 1997 for a similar model). This can lead them to feel their personal freedoms are constrained, causing anger and backlash against minority groups (Plant & Devine, 2001). We predicted the largest feedback withholding bias from evaluators with a compliant motivation.

We carried out two experiments in which non-stigmatized undergraduates evaluated equally mediocre essays, ostensibly written by either a White or minority author (Study 1: Aboriginal Canadian; Study 2: Black). We expected to replicate an overall positivity bias in the final grade assigned to minority student writing consistent with an overpraising effect found in prior research (as in Harber, 1998, Harber, 2004), however, we also hypothesized an underlying withholding of negative feedback when we examined the nuances evaluators choose to address. In addition, we examined the roles of other-focused and self-focused motivations in predicting this effect.

Section snippets

Participants

Fifty-nine White, Canadian-born undergraduate students participated for research credit or payment. The study was run in groups with a maximum of five per group. Three participants were excluded from analyses because they expressed suspicion during a funnel debriefing that we were examining racial biases. Three additional participants from a single session were excluded because one participant openly questioned the cover story at the outset of the study. Lastly, one person failed to follow

Participants

Sixty-seven undergraduate participants (74% Asian, 26% White) received either research credit or payment. Two participants were unable to complete the study due to computer malfunctioning and three others gave feedback (in centimeters of highlighting) that exceeded three standard deviations from the mean of feedback given; these five participants were excluded from analyses (final N = 62).

Procedure

The cover story, measures and procedures were nearly identical to Study 1, with a few exceptions. First, the

General discussion

If students are to develop their ability to monitor and evaluate their own performance, they need to receive accurate feedback on their work. The present set of studies suggests that this might not always happen for minority students. In Study 2, all evaluators gave significantly less negative feedback to an essay written by a Black student than an essay of the same caliber written by a White student. Across both studies, this feedback withholding bias was most evident for participants who have

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