Incidents of Bias in College Classrooms: Instructor and Student Perceptions

Little is known about incidents of bias specific to college classrooms or how they are handled by instructors. To learn more about this subject, professors, graduate instructors, and undergraduates (N ! 2,523) completed surveys assessing perceptions of classroom bias. Results indicated that about a quarter of instructors and half of students perceived an incident of bias in a classroom in the last year. Instructors’ responses to bias commonly included forms of direct confrontation, discussion, and ignoring. Undergraduates perceived significantly more bias than did instructors and rated responses to bias as significantly less effective than did instructors. Undergraduates also reported that instructors were occasionally the perpetrators of bias. These results indicate that preparation of instructors should include increased awareness of bias and methods of handling classroom bias.