The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising scholar investigating how and why children come to endorse negative stereotypes for members of certain racial groups in early elementary school, and in particular, the role of teacher nonverbal behaviors in contributing to children's racial biases. Racial achievement gaps persist across the United States despite years of education research, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal programming, and countless teacher training programs. Early elementary school, when achievement gaps first emerge, is also the time when majority children begin to show racial bias, and when minority children are able to detect discrimination related to their membership in a particular social group. Therefore, school settings may play a key role in guiding children's racial biases. The goal of this research project is to examine one aspect of school settings that might contribute to children's early race biases: differences in teacher nonverbal behaviors toward members of different racial groups. This research will broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences through including undergraduate research assistants from a variety of backgrounds in the research design, data collection, and analysis of this project, and through partnering with local educators and school programs to collect data and disseminate findings. Additionally, this research takes place in the community surrounding the University of Hawaii. This context provides a unique and understudied setting to analyze the emergence of children's racial bias in school because of the high level of diversity in most elementary classrooms, and the prevalence of racial group stereotypes and achievement gaps that exist in the community. Research on children's racial attitudes in this context is critical, not only to gain a better understanding of the racial tensions that exist in this specific community, but also to illuminate the processes that underlie the emergence of children's racial bias more broadly. Finally, by examining one possible source of children's early racial biases, this work could aid in the development of interventions designed to reduce or prevent children's biases when they first emerge and ultimately promote the academic success of students from stigmatized groups.
Although children begin to show racial bias and endorse racial stereotypes around the age of school entry the role of school settings in contributing to the emergence of these attitudes has gone largely untested. Previous research suggests that children are adept at using nonverbal information to make judgments about unfamiliar individuals and that nonverbal behaviors can guide children's attitudes for individuals from different racial groups. Moreover, researchers in education have found that teachers often differ in their nonverbal behaviors toward children from different racial groups. This research is the first to examine whether children might use teacher nonverbal behaviors to guide their racial attitudes. Study 1 determines whether young children use differential teacher treatment to guide their inferences about children from different groups using a novel groups design. Study 2 analyzes teacher behaviors toward students from different racial groups in relation to teachers' implicit bias and classroom diversity. Study 3 tests whether viewing positive teacher behaviors toward students from negatively stereotyped groups results in a reduction in children's racial biases. This research allows for a more complete understanding of the mechanisms that drive children's early racial biases and lays the groundwork for educational interventions designed to reduce or prevent these biases when they first emerge.
