research questions about race and education

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Jennifer L. Hochschild

H.l. jayne professor of government, and professor of african and african american studies.

Center for Government and International Studies 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Race, Ethnicity, and Education Policy

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Race and Education Policy

Jennifer L. Hochschild and Francis X. Shen

March 4, 2009

For Oxford Handbook on Racial and Ethnic Politics in America , edited by Mark Sawyer, David Leal and Taeku Lee. Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010.

            A complex mix of new and old race politics shapes contemporary education policy.  The growing presence of Asian and especially Latino children and parents in multiethnic schools and districts will shape education policy in the 21 st century (Clarke, et. al. 2006)., but these new actors will act within the contours of the United States’ history of (often failed) reform efforts on behalf of African-American students. This combination of history and innovation suggests that the already tense arena of schooling is poised to become even more fraught – and possibly also more dynamic and successful.

            Although racial and ethnic politics pervade education policymaking, so do nonracial narratives and explanations. Thus making the distinctive role of race clear is a delicate as well as important task for scholars and policymakers. To date, a racial lens has done a better job of raising important questions about the efficacy and purpose of education policies and governance structures than it has in answering them.  Research results conflict on everything from bilingual teaching methods to the appropriate subgroups in the federal law known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB); the field needs better data, improved methodologies, and less tendentious scholarship. In this chapter we review some of the most critical debates for scholars and policymakers.

Opportunity and Achievement: How Are Race and Ethnicity Associated with Schooling Outcomes?

Attainment:   Racial and ethnic disparities in schooling outcomes begin with the simplest and perhaps most important measure of success – years of schooling.  In 2007, 91 percent of non-Hispanic Whites, compared with 83 percent of Blacks and only 60 percent of Hispanics over age 25 had at least a high school degree.  The proportion of adult Americans with B.A. or higher degrees followed a similar pattern: 32 percent of non-Hispanic Whites, 19 percent of Blacks, and only 13 percent of Hispanics.  Data for other groups come from the 2000 census so are not quite comparable; as of 2000, 80 percent of adult Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 71 percent of American Indians/Alaska Natives held a high school degree or more.  The comparable figures for a B.A. or higher degree are 44 percent and 12 percent. [1]

            In short, Asian Americans are by far the best educated group in the United States, followed by Anglos, Blacks, American Indians, and Latinos, in that order.  These outcomes result from a complex interaction of residential location, recency of immigration, family socioeconomic status, personal preference, discrimination or biased treatment, and quality of schooling. Educational attainment and race are clearly related, but not in any simple causal way.

The Achievement Gap: Minority students’ access to high-quality education and achievement improved over the past few decades; as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the black-white test score gap narrowed between the early 1970s and 2004 in both reading and mathematics for students at all three ages tested (age 9, 13, and 17). [2] Nevertheless, the gap remains sizeable and pervasive (Magnuson and Waldfogel 2008).

Not surprisingly, researchers have struggled to explain the persistent racial achievement gap, and to identify policies that will ameliorate it. Explanations range from racial bias in testing (Jencks 1998) to discrimination or segregation in schools and classrooms (Farkas 2003), socioeconomic disparities of families and communities (Magnuson and Votruba-Drzal 2009; Lleras 2008), differences in familial interaction (Lee and Bowen 2006), teachers’ perceptions and treatment of students (Ferguson 2003),  Black students’ hesitance to “act white” (Ogbu 2002, 2004), and overall school quality (Hanushek and Rivkin 2006).  Each explanation has been criticized (for example, see Spencer et. al. 2001 and Ferguson 2001 on acting white; Fryer and Levitt 2006 on observable teacher and school characteristics; Campbell et. al. 2008 on income inequality). So far, no attempt to adjudicate among these explanations has persuaded most researchers, educators, or policy-makers.

Analysis of achievement gaps now extends to Latinos (Valenzuela 2005). The Hispanic-Anglo gap has also narrowed since the mid-1970s, but remains sizeable and has in fact increased in some age groups since 1999. [3] Explanations include not only those listed above for the Black-White gap, but also focus on language facility and bilingual education programs, the disruptions of immigration, and possibly cultural differences with regard to schooling (Reardon and Galindo 2008, Ryabov and Van Hooka 2007; more generally, see Baumann et. al. 2007).

NAEP scores are a good example of the ways in which issues of race and ethnicity are inevitably entwined with other dimensions of social life.. The gaps between students whose parents have a college degree or more, and those whose parents have less than a high school education are now larger than the gaps between Blacks or Hispanics and Anglos. They have also declined less since the earliest years of testing. [4]   Of course, Blacks and Latinos are a disproportionate share of students with low socioeconomic status, so these results are not independent of race.  But the majority of low status students are still non-Hispanic Whites, so it is important to remember that class disadvantages may play a role separate from racial or ethnic disadvantages (Berliner 2006).

Other issues are more specific to race and ethnicity. For example, several times during the past few decades, debates over bilingual education have been especially heated (Schmidt 2000); as immigrants and their children become an ever larger share of students, these debates may reemerge. As with the achievement gap, scholars have produced dueling studies and meta-analyses about the efficacy of various forms of bilingual education (Greene 1999; August and Hakuta 1998).  In our judgment, the primary issue is not whether bilingual schooling works or which program works best, but rather how to attain high quality teaching in any program. Good teaching enables students to learn in English; bad teaching does not (Hochschild and Scovronick 2003).

            Considering education through the lens of race and ethnicity raises a more fundamental question: what outcomes should a school system focus on?  Do schools succeed if English Language Learners become competent in academic English, or should they also help students maintain their native language? How much attention should schools pay to multicultural reading lists and curricular offerings, as compared with the traditional canon? Does Afrocentrism warrant a place in public schooling (Hochschild and Scovronick 2003; Binder 2004)?  Will students learn more from teachers who focus on improving mathematical and literacy skills, or from teachers who share the background, values, and identity of their students?  

School Choice:  Of the many proposals to address achievement disparities, public school choice through charter schools and voucher programs has sparked some of the most contentious debate.  Some argue that choice does or will raise student performance, perhaps especially for minority populations (Howell and Peterson 2002).  Others fear that choice produces more racial stratification in schools, distracts educators and parents from what they really need to work on, and – for privatized voucher programs -- undermines the highly desirable publicness of public schools (Hochschild and Skovronick 2003).

            The empirical evidence on choice suggests that its effects are not strong enough to warrant passion in either support or opposition.  Voucher schools are occasionally associated with small improvements in students’ test scores, and more often with increased parental satisfaction (Rouse and Barrow 2009; see also Jacob and Ludwig 2009).  But achievement has changed little, many students leave their chosen school, most people do not really know what a voucher system is (Moe 2001), and vouchers have always been rejected in referenda and almost always in state legislative processes.  Only a few hundred thousand students, in the most generous definition of individual school choice, are involved in these programs and there is little reason to expect many more to be.

            Charter schools are more significant, since over a million students now attend them (out of 49 million students in K-12 schools).  The number of charter schools is growing, and their structure and organization seems to be stabilizing.  Some are lauded as the best hope for poor Black and Hispanic children (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003), but others worry that charter schools openly (Dee and Fu 2004, Wells 1998, Bulkley and Fisler 2003), or implicitly (Weiher and Tedin 2002; Lacireno-Paquet 2002) reinforce racial stratification (for counterevidence, see Forman, Jr. 2007). To sound the same theme one more time, the research literature is mixed on whether charter schools do or do not improve academic outcomes (Jacob and Ludwig 2009).

No Child Left Behind:  However educators design future school reform efforts, they must act within state and federal accountability frameworks. Currently the framework results from the federal NCLB’s emphasis on schools’ “adequate yearly progress,” determined by standardized tests devised by each state. NCLB requires that, with a few exceptions, schools break out their performance by racial or ethnic subgroup, and show adequate yearly progress for each group (Kim and Sunderman 2005, Darling-Hammond 2007)

            Schools with high proportions of poor and nonAnglo students often have special difficulties in making adequate yearly progress; getting educators to focus on this problem was the reason for requiring these subgroup measures . Whether this type of accountability will improve student performance, however, remains an open question (Darling-Hammond 2007). Schools may expend more energy finding ways to reduce the number of students in a particular category or otherwise gaming the system than actually doing the hard work needed to improve struggling students’ level of achievement.  Students who do poorly on the state tests, a high proportion of whom are minorities, may drop out or be pushed out of school (Orfield and Kornhaber 2001). 

            Nevertheless, some scholars provide evidence that schools’ responses to accountability mandates do in fact help at least some minority students.  Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond (2005: 298-9) point out that the effects of NCLB cannot be separated from the effects of states’ own new accountability systems, but that together they “lead to larger achievement growth than would have occurred without accountability.  The analysis… supports the contested provisions of NCLB that impose sanctions on failing schools…. Hispanic students gain most from accountability while African Americans gain least.  [To address the issue of schools gaming the system,] we analyze the rate of placement into special education across states but find no evidence of reaction in this dimension.”  Carnoy and Loeb (2002) even find gains for all students, including Blacks and Hispanics, in states with strong accountability systems. They too find no harmful effects on retention or progress toward graduation (although some uncertainty about Hispanics remains on that score).

Reflecting the continued uncertainty about the effects of NCLB, some civil rights groups and liberal politicians strongly favor its continuance after some revision (Kahlenberg 2008; Jacob and Ludwig 2009), while others equally strongly support its abolition (Wiley and Wright 2004).  Sorting out those issues is not only a matter of race and ethnicity – among other things, students’ class, urbanicity, immigration status, or personal behaviors and preferences may matter just as much.  But in the arena of American schooling, racial and ethnic politics will inevitably play a role in trying to resolve disputes over what constitutes a good education and how we can provide it.  

Representation and School Governance: How Are Race and Ethnicity Associated with Power?

Not only outcomes but also processes of education have racial and ethnic inflections – along with other explanatory factors such as class, region, or individual actions and views.  In this arena also, researchers are much better at posing questions and defending their own chosen answers than at generating a set of explanations compelling to most analysts.  

Urban School Politics: The biggest problems in American schooling lie in large urban school districts. [5]   Fully 71 percent of the students in the 100 largest school districts are non-Anglo (compared with 44 percent in all school districts), and over half are poor enough to be eligible for free or reduced-price lunches (compared with two-fifths in all districts). [6]  Thirteen percent of urban students have Individualized Educational Programs (IEPs), meaning that they are in some sort of special education; 14 percent are in English Language Learner programs.  Over 40 percent of eighth graders in large central city schools read at a level “below basic,” compared with a quarter in suburban and rural schools. The comparable figures for math are 50 and 29 percent. [7]   About 70 percent of first year students in these high schools graduate within four years, but the graduation rate in New York City, Los Angeles, Detroit, Milwaukee, Baltimore, and elsewhere hovers around 50 percent or lower. This is a challenging set of students to teach, even under the best circumstances – which are seldom obtained in urban schools. Urban students’ lower test scores reflect the difficult circumstances of their schooling.

It should be no surprise by now to realize that scholars differ on the salience of race in determining policies for improving urban education.  If “race is a fundamental component of personal identity and perception,” then race-based coalitions seem essential for meaningful education reform in cities, and racial cleavages should be a central concern of reformers.  Conversely, if race is a more “vestigial and spurious variable,” such that the “significance of race can be expected to decline” as an explanation for schooling processes and outcomes, then reformers should emphasize economic development of the city and its residents, and should orient the inevitable political bargaining around material incentives (Henig et. al. 1999, 18).  Although education politics often remains racialized (Stone 2001; Henig and Rich 2004),  election of Black mayors and elevation of more Blacks to positions of civic power have not necessarily helped Black students (Orr 1999; Thompson 2005).  In fact,some White mayors or school superintendents have arguably been more effective in improving graduation rates or achievement levels.

In any case, the traditional Black-White binary is no longer sufficient for analyzing or producing efforts toward reform because emerging Latino, and in some cases Asian, electorates are making new demands on schools and their children are bringing new needs and talents into classrooms (Clarke et. al. 2006). Minority political actors who are neither White nor Black also make coalitional possibilities both more flexible and less stable (Clarke et. al. 2006; Sidney 2002; Vaca 2004).  In keeping with work on coalitions more broadly (Kaufmann 2004, Hochschild and Rogers 2000), rainbow coalitions in urban education policy are difficult to form or sustain under pressure (Rocha 2007).

School Boards:   Elections to the local school board provides an opportunity for coalitions or contestation over urban school reform.  Blacks and Latinos have attained increased descriptive representation over the past forty years. Not surprisingly, variation in school board representation is associated with variation in minority population across the states, so that Black representation is greatest in the South and Hispanic representation greatest in the West and Southwest (Marschall 2005). In addition, most scholars find that single-member electoral districts make Blacks and Latinos more likely to be elected to school boards (Leal, et. al. 2004), although a few have found at-large elections to be just as effective, at least for Latinos (Fraga and Elis 2009). 

However achieved, greater Black or Latino power in educational decision making leads to more non-Anglo district administrators (Fraga, et. al. 1986, Leal et. al. 2004, Fraga and Elis 2009). But evidence that descriptive representation on boards has any relationship to students’ educational outcomes remains elusive (Pitts 2007).

            Largely out of frustration with the apparent ineffectiveness of directly elected school boards (Howell 2005), some of the United States’ largest school districts such as Boston, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland have returned to an older model of mayoral-appointed school boards (Wong et. al. 2007).  The theory is that mayors with direct control over the school district can do more to promote reform and can be held accountable for their success.  Either state legislative actions or citywide referenda have introduced this innovation, in each case with prominent and contentious racial and ethnic politics (Henig and Rich 2004). Opponents argue that handing over control of the school board to a mayor would deprive Black voters of hard won rights to deliberate and choose their own representatives (Chambers’ 2006); supporters argue that what would mostly be lost are patronage jobs and cronyism in contracting that have no legitimate place in efforts to improve student achievement. Empirical analysis lends support to both sides: mayoral control may lead to significant, positive gains in achievement, but it still makes little dent in the district’s achievement deficit (Wong et. al. 2007).  To understand why this deficit has become so large we must return to considerations of race, class, immigration, and history.

The Courts: Desegregation: As the issue of choosing school boards implies, improving schools is a matter of identifying not only the right strategies for reform but also the right location in the policy stream for issues to be decided.  Under some conditions the courts, as well as legislatures, mayors and boards, have the power to change education policy (Lucas and Paret 2005).  The federal courts’ most visible policy has been racial desegregation (Ogletree 2004; Clotfelter 2004; Bell 2005).  In the state courts, the comparable issue has been school finance (Bosworth 2001; on both see Hochschild and Skovronick 2003).

The Supreme Court has come almost full circle on school desegregation in roughly a century.  The 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson , which legitimated “equal but separate” accommodations, was implicitly overturned in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education .  A period of more or less energetic desegregation of schools followed, but was largely halted by the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Parents Involved in Community  Schools v. Seattle School District. That decision invalidated voluntary race-based student assignment policies in Seattle and Louisville, thus renewing questions about whether and how the Constitution allows the public school system to consider race in student assignment (Fischbach, et. al. 2008). 

Are students still impermissibly segregated?  Some argue that policymakers still need to “continuously acknowledge the vast, interlocking structural barriers to equal opportunity… [including] discrimination and government policy [and] segregated neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage” (Ogletree and Eaton 2008: 298).  In this view, the educational system continues to demonstrate racial and, increasingly, ethnic separation within classrooms, schools, districts, and states  (Orfield and Lee 2007).  Others, however, offer a more optimistic interpretation of the history and future of school desegregation:

Because desegregation was so strongly legitimated in the decades after the Brown

decision, court mandates were no longer a necessary condition for race conscious

district policies in the 1990s, when these mandates were being withdrawn. [S]chool patterns observed in 1970 represented a “regime of segregation” that was replaced by 1990 and 2000 by a very different “regime of desegregation” (Logan et al. 2008: 1614).

Logan and his co-authors find that the level of primary school segregation between districts rose from an average score of 49 in 1970 to 55 in 2000.  However, Black-White segregation within school districts declined more, from 79 in 1970 to 50 in 2000. Thus overall levels of school segregation have decreased considerably (Logan et al. 2008: 1627-1629).  Whether those declines in segregation survive Parents Involved , or whether they accelerate as more Blacks enter the middle class, more Latinos and Asian Americans move away from gateway cities, and/or more people identify themselves or their children as multiracial, remains to be seen.

The Courts: School Finance:  In the state courts, the interrelated nature of race, class, and schooling has played out in decades of school finance litigation (Bosworth 2001). Since the 1970s, all fifty states have implemented policies for school finance equalization or equity (Hoxby 2001).  While no state has adopted an overtly race-conscious funding strategy, the strong correlation between high-poverty and high-minority school populations means that equity policies have significantly affected the resources available to minority students.  

            Are more resources associated with greater student attainment and achievement, particularly of students at the lower end of the educational distribution?  As usual, scholars differ (Burtless 1996).  Some argue that “the small gains [in NAEP scores for 12 th graders since 1971] do not represent significant progress. They are certainly trivial compared to the magnitude of the increase in education spending over the same period” (Greene 2005: 11).  More precisely and usefully, “pure resource policies that do not change incentives are unlikely to be effective” (Hanushek 2006: 865).  Most researchers agree with that formulation, but many insist that resources have in fact changed incentives and opportunities sufficiently to warrant claims on even more, well-targeted, support for low-achieving students.  One set of experts, for example, calculate that even if districts became 15 percent more efficient, federal funding for poor students or districts “will have to more than double in urbanized states with relatively high student proficiency rates… and increase five to ten times in states with low proficiency rates… to meet a 90 percent proficiency target” as mandated by NCLB (Duncombe et al. 2008: 20). [8]

            As states collect more and more systematic data through their accountability systems, analysis of the use and impact of resources will move to the student and classroom level. Research will be better able to identify patterns of resource allocation across racial and ethnic groups (Rubenstein et. al. 2007). That will, in turn, lead back to questions of implementation and effectiveness.  Court-ordered reallocations of school finance leave districts with much autonomy to allocate resources.  How should those resources be allocated, for example in weighing programs for gifted and talented students against programs for students needing remedial aid? How should race or ethnicity be weighed against class, recency of immigration, and other factors in making these decisions?  How can incentives for teachers, administrators, and students be aligned with each other and with appropriate goals – and who should set the goals? How much should community deliberation weigh compared with expertise or political clout?  Once again, more conclusive research might help to connect institutional rules, educational practices, and schoolhouse outcomes.

Revisiting Race and Ethnicity

Most of the scholarship just reviewed rests on two assumptions that require revisiting. Researchers and policy actors usually assume that racial or ethnic groups have discrete boundaries and accepted definitions, and that there is a unitary “Black”, “Latino,” “Anglo,” or “Asian” interest to be ascertained and advanced. We challenge both assumptions.

            Building on the efforts of legal scholars, critical race theorists in the field of education question whether race is useful as a category of analysis or politics (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995; see also Villenas 1999).  Racial classifications are fluid across individuals (Parker and Lynn 2002; Hochschild and Weaver 2009), and across institutions and time (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Williams 2006).  The race and ethnic classifications introduced in 2007 for collecting data to be reported to the federal Department of Education were so confusing that the Department published an aptly titled 90-page explanatory report, “Managing an Identity Crisis” (2008).  

Typically, either students choose a race (or their parents choose one for them) when they first enter a school, or teachers identify students based on skin color and appearance (Feldon 2006). States vary in whether students may identify with more than one race, and in the categories used for identification. States also vary in the number and array of immigrant students who do not understand themselves in terms of conventional American racial or ethnic labels.  These variations are more than a statistical annoyance, since NCLB’s emphasis on subgroup accountability makes categorization inevitable and high stakes.  Affirmative action policies and anti-discrimination policies also rest on an assumption that applicants and employees can be unproblematically sorted into groups -- and if that assumption is wrong, these policies need to be appropriately adjusted.

            Defining a “Black interest,” “Asian interest,” or “Latino interest” in education policy is even less straightforward.  For example, while LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens) and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) both oppose school voucher programs and other privatization efforts (Scott, et. al. 2008), multivariate analyses controlling for income and education show that many Black and Latino parents, especially in urban school districts, support them (Moe 2001). The older civil rights organizations may have different interests than the younger parents of children in failing schools.  Similarly, the category of “Asian American” must be disaggregated in order to recognize the differences in attainment and achievement across nationality groups.  Some nationalities -- Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians – are typically at the top of educational attainment measures, while others – Laotians, Hmong, Cambodian, and Vietnamese – are at the bottom (National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education  2008). Two-fifths of California’s voting Latinos supported Proposition 227, while others, including nonvoters, passionately denounced it as an attack on immigrants, minorities, and Spanish language and culture.  Middle class Blacks leave inner city schools almost as quickly as middle class Whites do, given the opportunity to enroll their children in a better school system.

            In short, scholars and policy makers alike need to remember that groups may not have a coherent interest in the arena of education policy and practice, beyond the powerful but anodyne desire for better schooling for their children.

Most questions raised in this chapter have no clear answers, and many important issues have barely been explored. Nevertheless, it is at least clear that race and ethnicity are central to understanding and evaluating education policy and practice in the United States.  On average, Anglos and Asians attain more years of schooling and achieve more in school than do Blacks and Latinos.  Non-Anglos are disproportionately enrolled in urban school districts, whose resources, political dynamics, and policy choices differ considerably from those of non-urban districts.  The ruling federal legislation requires schools to categorize and evaluate students by race and ethnicity, even while the government recognizes that labeling students is much more difficult than it initially appears to be.

As if this brief summary were not sufficiently daunting, a recent Commission on Research in Black Education (CORIBE) called for shifting “the research framework beyond a narrow focus on… ‘acting White,’… ‘stereotype threat,’ the ‘achievement gap… or quick-fix school reforms” to a more “transformative agenda” (King 2005: 349).  It is right; there is plenty of work to be done, both in schools and in examining schools.

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Lleras, C. 2008. Race, Racial Concentration, and the Dynamics of Educational Inequality Across Urban and Suburban Schools. American Educational Research Journal 45 (4): 886-912.

Logan, J., D. Oakley, and J. Stowell. 2008. School Segregation in Metropolitan Regions, 1970–2000: The Impacts of Policy Choices on Public Education, American Journal of Sociology . 113 (6): 1611-1644.

Lucas, S. and M. Paret. 2005. Law, Race, and Education in the United States, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 1: 203–31.

Magnuson, K. & J. Waldfogel, eds. 2008. Steady Gains and Stalled Progress: Inequality and the Black-White Test Score Gap . New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Magnuson, K. and E. Votruba-Drzal. 2009. Enduring Influences of Childhood Poverty, In M. Cancian and S. Danziger eds., Changing Poverty .  New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp.  XX [FXS1]  

Marschall, M. 2005. Minority Incorporation and Local School Boards, In W. Howell, ed., Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics ,. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, pp. 173-198.

Moe, T. 2001. Schools , Vouchers, and the American Public. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution.

National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education 2008. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders: Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight. New York: College Board.

Ogbu, J. 2002. Black-American Students and the Academic Achievement Gap: What Else You Need to Know. Journal of Thought . 37(4): 9–33.

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Ogletree, C.. 2004. All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown V. Board of Education . New York: Norton.

Ogletree, C. & S. Eaton. 2008. From Little Rock To Seattle And Louisville: Is ‘All Deliberate Speed’ Stuck In Reverse? University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review . 30 (2): 279-302.

Orfield, G. & M. Kornhaber, eds. 2001. Raising Standards or Raising Barriers? Inequality and High-Stakes Testing in Public Education . New York: Century Foundation Press.

Orfield, G. and C. Lee. 2007. Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation, and the Need for New Integration Strategies . Los Angeles CA: UCLA, Civil Rights Project/ Proyecto Derechos Civiles.

Orr, M. 1999. Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, 1986-1998 . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Parker, L. and M. Lynn. 2002. What's Race Got to Do With It? Critical Race Theory's Conflicts with and Connections to Qualitative Research Methodology and Epistemology, Qualitative Inquiry 8 (1): 7-22.

Pitts, D. 2007. Representative Bureaucracy, Ethnicity, and Public Schools Examining the Link Between Representation and Performance. Administration & Society , 39 (4): 497-526.

Reardon, S. & C. Galindo. 2008. The Hispanic-White Achievement Gap in Math and Reading in the Elementary Grades. Stanford University Institute for Research on Education Policy & Practice. Working Paper 2008-01.

Rocha, R. 2007. Black-Brown Coalitions in Local School Board Elections, Political Research Quarterly 60 (2): 315-327.

Rouse, C. and L. Barrow. 2009. School Vouchers and Student Achievement: Recent Evidence, Remaining Questions. Annual Review of Economics , 1: forthcoming.

Rubenstein, R., A. Schwartz, and L. Stiefel. 2007. From Districts to Schools: The Distribution of Resources across Schools in Big City School Districts, Economics of Education Review . 26 (5): 532-545.

Ryabov, I. & J. Van Hooka. 2007. School Segregation and Academic Achievement among Hispanic Children. Social Science Research . 36 (2): 767-788.

Schmidt, R. 2000. Language Policy and Identity Politics in the United States . Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Scott, J. , C. Lubienski, E. DeBray-Pelot. 2008. The Ideological and Political Landscape of School Choice Interest Groups in the Post Zelman Era, In B. Cooper, J. Cibulka, & L. Fusarel, eds,  Handbook of Education Politics and Policy . New York: Taylor & Francis. Pp. 246-262.

Sidney, M. 2002. The Role of Ideas in Education Politics: Using Discourse Analysis to Understand Barriers to Reform in Multi-Ethnic Cities. Urban Affairs Review 38: 253-79.

Spencer, M., E. Noll, J. Stoltzfus, and V. Harpalani. 2001. Identity and School Adjustment: Revisiting the ‘Acting White’ Assumption, Educational Psychologist , 36 (1): 21-30.

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Valenzuela, A., ed. 2006. Leaving Children Behind: How ‘Texas-Style’ Accountability Fails Latino Youth. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Villenas, S., ed. 1999. Race Is . . . Race Isn’t: Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Studies in Education . Boulder CO: Westview Press.

U. S. Department of Education. 2008. Managing an Identity Crisis: Forum Guide to Implementing New Race and Ethnicity Categories. Washington D.C.:  U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

Weiher, G.. and K. Tedin. 2002. Does Choice Lead to Racially Distinctive Schools? Charter Schools and Household Preferences. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 21 (1): 79-92.

Wiley, T. and W. Wright. 2004, Against the Undertow: Language-Minority Education Policy and Politics in the ‘Age of Accountability’. Educational Policy 18 (1): 142-168.

Williams, K. 2006. Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

[1] National Center on Education Statistics. 2007 Digest of Education Statistics : Table 8 (for Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics); Table 12 (for Asians and Indians). http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_008.asp ; http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_012.asp  

[2] Institute of Education Sciences. The Nation’s Report Card. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub-reading-race.asp; http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub-math-race.asp

[3] Institute of Education Sciences. The Nation’s Report Card. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub_reading_race2.asp; http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub_math_race2.asp

[4] http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub-reading-pared.asp

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub-math-pared.asp

[5] Schools in poor rural communities and Indian reservations can also be very problematic, but they affect fewer students and are much less well studied, so we cannot consider them in this short chapter.

[6] Except where noted, data in this paragraph are from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/100_largest_0506/tables.asp

[7] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2005/section2/table.asp?tableID=257

[8] The authors recognize that “such increases are… unrealistic,” which leaves them with the conclusion that NCLB’s standards for students’ improvement are both “unfair’ and “ineffective” for “states and districts serving large populations of disadvantaged students” (Duncombe et al. 2008: 20).

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Updated Guidance on the Reporting of Race and Ethnicity in Medical and Science Journals

• 1 Executive Managing Editor, JAMA and the JAMA Network, Chicago, Illinois
• 2 Deputy Managing Editor, JAMA Network, Chicago, Illinois
• 3 Managing Editor, JAMA , Chicago, Illinois
• Editorial The Reporting of Race and Ethnicity in Medical and Science Journals Annette Flanagin, RN, MA; Tracy Frey, BA; Stacy L. Christiansen, MA; Howard Bauchner, MD JAMA
• Editorial Guidance on Race, Ethnicity, and Origin as Proxies for Genetic Ancestry in Biomedical Publication W. Gregory Feero, MD, PhD; Robert D. Steiner, MD; Anne Slavotinek, MBBS, PhD; Tiago Faial, PhD; Michael J. Bamshad, MD; Jehannine Austin, PhD, CGC; Bruce R. Korf, MD, PhD; Annette Flanagin, RN, MA; Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, MAS JAMA

The goal of this guidance is to provide recommendations and suggestions that encourage fairness, equity, consistency, and clarity in use and reporting of race and ethnicity in medical and science journals. As previously summarized, “terminology, usage, and word choice are critically important, especially when describing people and when discussing race and ethnicity. Inclusive language supports diversity and conveys respect. Language that imparts bias toward or against persons or groups based on characteristics or demographics must be avoided.” 1

With the publication of an earlier version of this guidance, 1 comments were invited, and helpful assessments and comments were received from numerous reviewers, scholars, and researchers, who provided valuable feedback and represented diverse expertise and opinions. After thorough review of these comments (some of which did not agree with others) and additional research and discussion, the guidance was revised and updated, and additional formal review was obtained. In this Editorial, we present the updated guidance, and we sincerely thank the many reviewers for their contributions, each of whom are listed in the Acknowledgment at the end of this article.

This guidance continues to acknowledge that race and ethnicity are social constructs as well as the important sensitivities and controversies related to use of these terms and associated nomenclature in medical and health research, education, and practice. Thus, for content published in medical journals, language and terminology must be accurate, clear, and precise, and must reflect fairness, equity, and consistency in use and reporting of race and ethnicity. The guidance also acknowledges that the reporting of race and ethnicity should not be considered in isolation and should be accompanied by reporting of other sociodemographic factors and social determinants, including concerns about racism, disparities, and inequities, and the intersectionality of race and ethnicity with these other factors.

The guidance defines commonly used terms associated with race and ethnicity and acknowledges that these terms and definitions have changed, that some are out of date, and that the nomenclature will continue to evolve. Other topics addressed include relevant concerns and controversies in health care and research, including the intersectionality of ancestry and heritage, social determinants of health, and other socioeconomic, structural, institutional, cultural, and demographic factors; reporting of race and ethnicity in research articles; use of racial and ethnic collective or umbrella terms, capitalization, and abbreviations; listing racial and ethnic categories in alphabetical order vs order by majority; adjectival vs noun usage for categories of race and ethnicity; geographic origin and regionalization considerations; and brief guidance for journals and publishers that collect demographic data on editors, authors, and peer reviewers. Examples are provided to help guide authors and editors.

This updated guidance on reporting race and ethnicity is being added to the Inclusive Language section of the AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors as subsection 11.2.3, Race and Ethnicity (see below). 2 This section of the Correct and Preferred Usage chapter of the style manual also includes subsections that address reporting concerns and preferred nomenclature for sex and gender, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic status, and persons with diseases, disorders, or disabilities. Each of these subsections also will be reviewed and updated.

With this publication, this guidance will be freely available on the JAMA website and in the AMA Manual of Style , 2 and linked from the JAMA Network journals’ Instructions for Authors. Others are welcome to use and cite this guidance.

This guidance is not intended to be final but is presented with the understanding that monitoring will continue, and further updates will be provided as needed. Continual review of the terms and language used in the reporting of race and ethnicity is critically important as societal norms continue to evolve.

Section 11.12.3. Race and Ethnicity

Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning. The indistinct construct of racial and ethnic categories has been increasingly acknowledged, and concerns about use of these terms in medical and health research, education, and practice have been progressively recognized. Accordingly, for content published in medical and science journals, language and terminology must be accurate, clear, and precise and must reflect fairness, equity, and consistency in use and reporting of race and ethnicity. (Note: historically, although inappropriately, race may have been considered a biological construct; thus, older content may characterize race as having biological significance.)

One of the goals of this guidance is to encourage the use of language to reduce unintentional bias in medical and science literature. The reporting of race and ethnicity should not be considered in isolation but should be accompanied by reporting of other sociodemographic factors and social determinants, including concerns about racism, disparities, and inequities, and the intersectionality of race and ethnicity with these other factors.

When reporting the results of research that includes racial and ethnic disparities and inequities, authors are encouraged to provide a balanced, evidence-based discussion of the implications of the findings for addressing institutional racism and structural racism as these affect the study population, disease or disorder studied, and the relevant health care systems. For example, Introduction and Discussion sections of manuscripts could include implications of historical injustices when describing the differences observed by race and ethnicity. Such discussion of implications can use specific words, such as racism , structural racism , racial equity , or racial inequity , when appropriate.

Definitions

The definitions provided herein focus on reporting race and ethnicity. Definitions of broader terms (eg, disparity, inequity, intersectionality, and others) will be included in the overarching Inclusive Language section that contains this subsection.

“Race and ethnicity are dynamic, shaped by geographic, cultural, and sociopolitical forces.” 3 Race and ethnicity are social constructs and with limited utility in understanding medical research, practice, and policy. However, the terms may be useful as a lens through which to study and view racism and disparities and inequities in health, health care, and medical practice, education, and research. 3 - 5 Terms and categories used to define and describe race and ethnicity have changed with time based on sociocultural shifts and greater awareness of the role of racism in society. This guidance is presented with that understanding, and updates have been and will continue to be provided as needed.

The terms race (first usage dating back to the 1500s) and ethnicity (first usage dating back to the late 1700s) 6 have changed and continue to evolve semantically. The Oxford English Dictionary currently defines race as “a group of people connected by common descent or origin” or “any of the (putative) major groupings of mankind, usually defined in terms of distinct physical features or shared ethnicity” and ethnicity as “membership of a group regarded as ultimately of common descent, or having a common national or cultural tradition.” 7 For example, in the US, ethnicity has referred to Hispanic or Latino, Latina, or Latinx people. Outside of the US, other terms of ethnicity may apply within specific nations or ancestry groups. As noted in a lexicographer’s post on the Conscious Style Guide , race and ethnicity are difficult to untangle. 6 In general, ethnicity has historically referred to a person’s cultural identity (eg, language, customs, religion) and race to broad categories of people that are divided arbitrarily but based on ancestral origin and physical characteristics. 6 Definitions that rely on external determinations of physical characteristics are problematic and may perpetuate racism. In addition, there is concern about whether these and other definitions are appropriate or out-of-date 8 and whether separation of subcategories of race from subcategories of ethnicity could be discriminatory, especially when used by governmental agencies and institutions to guide policy, funding allocations, budgets, and data-driven business and research decisions. 9 Thus, proposals have been made that these terms be unified into an aggregate, mutually exclusive set of categories as in “race and ethnicity.” 10 (See Additional Guidance for Use of Racial and Ethnic Collective Terms.)

The term ancestry refers to a person’s country or region of origin or an individual’s lineage of descent. Another characteristic of many populations is genetic admixture , which refers to genetic exchange among people from different ancestries and may correlate with an individual’s risk for certain genetic diseases. 3 Ancestry and genetic admixture may provide more useful information about health, population health, and genetic variants and risk for disease or disorders than do racial and ethnic categories. 3

Although race and ethnicity have no biological meaning, the terms have important, albeit contested, social meanings. Neglecting to report race and ethnicity in health and medical research disregards the reality of social stratification, injustices, and inequities and implications for population health, 3 , 4 and removing race and ethnicity from research may conceal health disparities. Thus, inclusion of race and ethnicity in reports of medical research to address and further elucidate health disparities and inequities remains important at this time.

According to the “Health Equity Style Guide for the COVID-19 Response: Principles and Preferred Terms for Non-Stigmatizing, Bias-Free Language” of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), racism is defined as a “system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on the social interpretation of how one looks...(“race”), that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities, and undermines realization of the full potential of our whole society through the waste of human resources.” 11 Note that racism and prejudice can occur without phenotypic discrimination.

Jones 12 and the CDC style guide 11 have defined 3 levels of racism.

Systemic, institutionalized, and structural racism : “Structures, policies, practices, and norms resulting in differential access to the goods, services, and opportunities of society by ‘race’ (eg, how major systems—the economy, politics, education, criminal justice, health, etc—perpetuate unfair advantage).” 11 The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook advises to not shorten these terms to “racism,” to avoid confusion with the other definitions. 13

Interpersonal and personally mediated racism : “Prejudice and discrimination, where prejudice is differential assumptions about the abilities, motives, and intents of others by ‘race,’ and discrimination is differential actions towards others by ‘race.’ These can be either intentional or unintentional.” 11

Internalized racism : “Acceptance by members of the stigmatized ‘races’ of negative messages about their own abilities and intrinsic worth.” 11

Concerns, Sensitivities, and Controversies in Health Care and Research

There are many examples of reported associations between race and ethnicity and health outcomes, but these outcomes may also be intertwined with ancestry and heritage, social determinants of health, as well as socioeconomic, structural, institutional, cultural, demographic, or other factors. 3 , 4 , 14 Thus, discerning the roles of these factors is difficult. For example, a person’s ancestral heritage may convey certain health-related predispositions (eg, cystic fibrosis in persons of Northern European descent and sickle cell disease reported among people whose ancestors were from sub-Saharan Africa, India, Saudi Arabia, and Mediterranean countries); however, such perceptions have resulted in underdiagnosis of these conditions in other populations. 15

Also, certain groups may bear a disproportionate burden of disease compared with other groups, but this may reflect individual and systemic disparities and inequities in health care and social determinants of health. For example, according to the US National Cancer Institute, the rates of cervical cancer are higher among Hispanic/Latina women and Black/African American women than among women of other racial or ethnic groups, with Black/African American women having the highest rates of death from the disease, but social determinants of health and inequities are also associated with a high prevalence of cervical cancer among these women. 16 The American Heart Association summarizes similar disparities in cardiovascular disease among Black individuals in the US compared with those from other racial and ethnic groups. 17

Identifying the race or ethnicity of a person or group of participants, along with other sociodemographic variables, may provide information about participants included in a study and the potential generalizability of the results of a study and may identify important disparities and inequities. Researchers should aim for inclusivity by providing comprehensive categories and subcategories where applicable. Many people may identify with more than 1 race and ethnicity; therefore, categories should not be considered absolute or viewed in isolation.

However, there is concern about the use of race in clinical algorithms and some health-based risk scores and databases because of inapplicability to some groups and the potential for discrimination and inappropriate clinical decisions. For example, the use of race to estimate glomerular filtration rates among Black adults has become controversial for several reasons. 18 - 21 Oversimplification of racial dichotomies can be harmful, such as in calculating kidney function, especially with racial inequities in kidney care. In this context, health inequities among populations should be addressed rather than focusing solely on differences in racial categories (eg, Black vs White adults with kidney disease). 21 Another example is the Framingham Risk Score, which was originally developed from a cohort of White, middle-class participants in the US included in the Framingham Heart Study and may not accurately estimate risk in other racial and ethnic populations. Similar concerns have been raised about genetic risk studies based on specific populations or that do not include participants from other groups (eg, a genome-wide association study that reports a genetic association with a specific disease or disorder based solely on a population of European descent). 22 Use caution in interpreting or generalizing findings from studies of risk based on populations of individuals representing specific or limited racial and ethnic categories.

Guidance for Reporting Race and Ethnicity in Research Articles

The JAMA Network journals include the following guidance for reporting race and ethnicity and other demographic information in research articles in the Instructions for Authors. 23

Demographic Information

Aggregate, deidentified demographic information (eg, age, sex, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic indicators) should be reported for research reports along with all prespecified outcomes. Demographic variables collected for a specific study should be indicated in the Methods section. Demographic information assessed should be reported in the Results section, either in the main article or in an online supplement or both. If any demographic characteristics that were collected are not reported, the reason should be stated. Summary demographic information (eg, baseline characteristics of study participants) should be reported in the first line of the Results section of the Abstract.

With regard to the collection and reporting of demographic data on race and ethnicity:

The Methods section should include an explanation of who identified participant race and ethnicity and the source of the classifications used (eg, self-report or selection, investigator observed, database, electronic health record, survey instrument).

If race and ethnicity categories were collected for a study, the reasons that these were assessed also should be described in the Methods section. If collection of data on race and ethnicity was required by the funding agency, that should be noted.

Specific racial and ethnic categories are preferred over collective terms, when possible. Authors should report the specific categories used in their studies and recognize that these categories will differ based on the databases or surveys used, the requirements of funders, and the geographic location of data collection or study participants. Categories included in groups labeled as “other” should be defined.

Categories should be listed in alphabetical order in text and tables.

Race and ethnicity categories of the study population should be reported in the Results section.

Reporting race and ethnicity in this study was mandated by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), consistent with the Inclusion of Women, Minorities, and Children policy. Individuals participating in the poststudy survey were categorized as American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, or White based on the NIH Policy on Reporting Race and Ethnicity Data. Children’s race and ethnicity were based on the parents’ report. Race was self-reported by study participants, and race categories (Black and White) were defined by investigators based on the US Office of Management and Budget’s Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity. Given that racial residential segregation is distinctively experienced by Black individuals in the US, the analytical sample was restricted to participants who self-identified as Black. In this genome-wide association study, participants were from 8 African countries (ie, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and Zambia). Any Black African group from any of the 8 African countries (mostly of Bantu descent) was included in the Black African cohort. The South African group composed primarily of multiple racial categories, comprising any admixture combination of individuals of European, Southeast Asian, South Asian, Bantu-speaking African, and/or indigenous Southern African hunter-gatherer ancestries (Khoikhoi, San, or Bushmen), was renamed admixed African individuals. The race and ethnicity of an individual was self-reported. Data for this study included US adults who self-reported as non-Hispanic Black (hereafter, Black), Hispanic or Latino, and non-Hispanic White (hereafter, White) individuals. We excluded individuals who self-reported being Asian or of other race and ethnicity (which included those who were American Indian or Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander) because of small sample sizes.

Additional Guidance for Use of Racial and Ethnic Collective Terms

Specific racial and ethnic terms are preferred over collective terms, when possible. Authors should report the specific categories used in their studies and recognize that these categories will differ based on the databases or surveys used, the requirements of funders, and the geographic location of data collection or study participants.

When collective terms are used, merging of race and ethnicity with a virgule as “race/ethnicity” is no longer recommended. Instead, “race and ethnicity” is preferred, with the understanding that there are numerous subcategories within race and ethnicity. Given that a virgule often means “and/or,” which can be confusing, do not use the virgule construction in this context (see also 8.4, Forward Slash [Virgule, Solidus]).

The general term minorities should not be used when describing groups or populations because it is overly vague and implies a hierarchy among groups. Instead, include a modifier when using the word “minority” and do not use the term as a stand-alone noun, for example, racial and ethnic minority groups and racial and ethnic minority individuals . 11 , 24 However, even this umbrella term may not be appropriate in some settings. Other terms such as underserved populations (eg, when referring to health disparities among groups) or underrepresented populations (eg, when referring to a disproportionately low number of individuals in a workforce or educational program) may be used provided the categories of individuals included are defined at first mention. 25 The term minoritized may be acceptable as an adjective provided that the noun(s) that it is modifying is included (eg, “racial and ethnic minoritized group”). Groups that have been historically marginalized could be suitable in certain contexts if the rationale for this designation is provided and the categories of those included are defined or described at first mention. 11

The nonspecific group label “other” for categorizing race and ethnicity is uninformative and may be considered pejorative. However, the term is sometimes used for comparison in data analysis when the numbers of those in some subgroups are too small for meaningful analyses. The term should not be used as a “convenience” grouping or label unless it was a prespecified formal category in a database or research instrument. In such cases, the categories included in “other” groups should be defined and reported. Authors are advised to be as specific as possible when reporting on racial and ethnic categories (even if these categories contain small numbers). If the numbers in some categories are so small as to potentially identify study participants, the specific numbers and percentages do not need to be reported provided this is noted. For cases in which the group “other” is used but not defined, the author should be queried for further explanation.

The terms multiracial and multiethnic are acceptable in reports of studies if the specific categories these terms comprise are defined or if the terms were predefined in a study or database to which participants self-selected. If the criteria for data quality and confidentiality are met, at a minimum, the number of individuals identifying with more than 1 race should be reported. Authors are encouraged to provide greater detail about the distribution of multiple racial and ethnic categories if known. In general, the term mixed race may carry negative connotations 13 and should be avoided, unless it was specifically used in data collection; in this case, the term should be defined, if possible. To the extent possible, the specific type of multiracial and multiethnic groups should be delineated.

In this study, 140 participants (25%) self-reported as multiracial, which included 100 (18%) identifying as Asian and White and 40 (7%) as Black and White.

Other terms may enter the lexicon as descriptors or modifiers for racial and ethnic categories of people. For example, the term people of color was introduced to mean all racial and ethnic groups that are not considered White or of European ancestry and as an indication of antiracist, multiracial solidarity. However, there is concern that the term may be “too inclusive,” to the point that it erases differences among specific groups. 13 , 26 - 28 There are similar concerns about use of the collective and abbreviated terms for Black, Indigenous, and people of color ( BIPOC ) and Black, Asian, and minority ethnic ( BAME ) (commonly used in the UK). Criticism of these terms has noted that they disregard individuals’ identities, do not include all underrepresented groups, eliminate differences among groups, and imply a hierarchy among them. 13 , 26 - 28 Although these terms may be used colloquially (eg, within an opinion article), preference is to describe or define the specific racial or ethnic categories included or intended to be addressed. These terms should not be used in reports of research, unless the terms are included in a database on which a study is based or specified in a research data collection instrument (eg, survey questionnaire).

In agreement with other guides, 13 , 24 other terms related to colors, such as brown and yellow , should not be used to describe individuals or groups. These terms may be less inclusive than intended or considered pejorative or a racial slur.

In addition, avoid collective reference to racial and ethnic minority groups as “non-White.” If comparing racial and ethnic groups, indicate the specific groups. Researchers should avoid study designs and statistical comparisons of White groups vs “non-White” groups and should specify racial and ethnic groups included and conduct analyses comparing the specific groups. If such a comparison is justified, authors should explain the rationale and specify what categories are included in the “non-White” group.

Capitalization

The names of races, ethnicities, and tribes should be capitalized, such as African American, Alaska Native, American Indian, Asian, Black, Cherokee Nation, Hispanic, Kamba, Kikuyu, Latino, and White. There may be sociopolitical instances in which context may merit exception to this guidance, for example, in an opinion piece for which capitalization could be perceived as inflammatory or inappropriate (eg, “white supremacy”).

Adjectival Usage for Specific Categories

Racial and ethnic terms should not be used in noun form (eg, avoid Asians , Blacks , Hispanics , or Whites ); the adjectival form is preferred (eg, Asian women, Black patients , Hispanic children , or White participants ) because this follows AMA style regarding person-first language. The adjectival form may be used as a predicate adjective to modify the subject of a phrase (eg, “the patients self-identified as Asian, Black, Hispanic, or White”). 11

Most combinations of proper adjectives derived from geographic entities are not hyphenated when used as racial or ethnic descriptors. Therefore, do not hyphenate terms such as Asian American , African American , Mexican American, and similar combinations, and in compound modifiers (eg, African American patient ).

Geographic Origin and Regionalization Considerations

Awareness of the relevance of geographic origin and regionalization associated with racial and ethnic designations is important. In addition, preferred usage may change about the most appropriate designation. For example, the term Caucasian had historically been used to indicate the term White , but it is technically specific to people from the Caucasus region in Eurasia and thus should not be used except when referring to people from this region.

The terms African American or Black may be used to describe participants in studies involving populations in the US, following how such information was recorded or collected for the study. However, the 2 terms should not be used interchangeably in reports of research unless both terms were formally used in the study, and the terms should be used consistently within a specific article. For example, among Black people residing in the US, those from the Caribbean may identify as Black but not as African American, whereas Black people whose families have been in the US for several generations may identify as Black and African American. When a study includes individuals of African ancestry in the diaspora, the term Black may be appropriate because it does not obscure cultural and linguistic nuances and national origins, such as Dominican, Haitian, and those of African sovereign states (eg, Kenyan, Nigerian, Sudanese), provided that the term was used in the study.

The term Asian is a broad category that can include numerous countries of origin (eg, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, Vietnam, and others) and regions (eg, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia). 29 The term may be combined with those from the Pacific Islands as in Asian or Pacific Islander . The term Asian American is acceptable when describing those who identify with Asian descent among the US population. However, reporting of individuals’ self-identified countries of origin is preferred when known. As with other categories, the formal terms used in research collection should be used in reports of studies.

In reference to persons indigenous to North America (and their descendants), American Indian or Alaska Native is generally preferred to the broader term Native American . However, the term Indigenous is also acceptable. There are also other specific designations for people from other locations, such as Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander . 29 , 30 If appropriate, specify the nation or peoples (eg, Inuit , Iroquois , Mayan, Navajo , Nez Perce , Samoan ). Many countries have specific categories for Indigenous peoples (eg, First Nations in Canada and Aboriginal in Australia). Capitalize the first word and use lowercase for people when describing persons who are Indigenous or Aboriginal (eg, Indigenous people, Indigenous peoples of Canada , Aboriginal people ). Lowercase indigenous when referring to objects, such as indigenous plants .

Hispanic , Latino or Latina , Latinx , and Latine are terms that have been used for people living in the US of Spanish-speaking or Latin American descent or heritage, but as with other terms, they can include people from other geographic locations. 29 , 30  Hispanic historically has been associated with people from Spain or other Spanish-speaking countries in the Western hemisphere (eg, Cuba, Central and South America, Mexico, Puerto Rico); however, individuals and some government agencies may prefer to specify country of origin. 29 - 31  Latino or Latina are broad terms that have been used for people of origin or descent from Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and some countries in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, but again, individuals may prefer to specify their country of origin. 29 - 31 When possible, a more specific term (eg, Cuban , Cuban American , Guatemalan, Latin American , Mexican , Mexican American , Puerto Rican ) should be used. However, as with other categories, the formal terms used in research collection should be used for reports of studies. For example, some US agencies also include Spanish origin when listing Hispanic and Latino. The terms Latinx and Latine are acceptable as gender-inclusive or nonbinary terms for people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the US. However, editors should avoid reflexively changing Latino and Latina to Latinx or vice versa and should follow author preference. Authors of research reports, in turn, should use the terms that were prespecified in their study (eg, via participant self-report or selection, investigator observed, database, electronic health record, survey instrument).

Description of people as being of a regional descent (eg, of African, Asian, European, or Middle Eastern or North African descent) is acceptable if those terms were used in formal research. However, it is preferable to identify a specific country or region of origin when known and pertinent to the study.

For the genome-wide association study discovery stage, study participants of African ancestry were recruited from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and the US, where the same phenotype definition was applied to diagnose primary open-angle glaucoma. The second validation meta-analysis included individuals with primary open-angle glaucoma and matched control individuals from Mali, Cameroon, Nigeria (Lagos, Kaduna, and Enugu), Brazil, Saudi Arabia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Morocco, and Peru.

For example, it is generally preferable to describe persons of Asian ancestry according to their country or regional area of origin (eg, Cambodian , Chinese , Indian , Japanese , Korean , Sri Lankan , East Asian , Southeast Asian ). Similarly, study participants from the Middle Eastern and North African region should be described using their nation of origin (eg, Egyptian , Iranian , Iraqi , Israeli , Lebanese ) when possible. Individuals of Middle Eastern and North African descent who identify with Arab ancestry and reside in the US may be referred to as Arab American . In such cases, researchers should report how categories were determined (eg, self-reported or selected by study participants or from demographic data in databases or other sources).

Note that Arab and Arab American, Asian and Asian American, Chinese and Chinese American , Mexican and Mexican American , and so on are not equivalent or interchangeable.

For studies that use national databases or include participants in a single country, a term for country of origin can be included if the term was provided at data collection (eg, Chinese American and Korean American for a study performed in the US, or Han Chinese and Zhuang Chinese for a study conducted in China). Again, how these designations were determined (eg, self-reported or selected or by other means) should be reported.

Abbreviations

Generally, abbreviations of categories for race and ethnicity should be avoided unless necessary because of space constraints (eg, in tables and figures) or to avoid long, repetitive strings of descriptors. If used, any abbreviations should be clearly explained parenthetically in text or in table and figure footnotes or legends.

Guidance for Journals and Publishers That Collect Data on Editors, Authors, and Peer Reviewers

Journals and publishers that collect race and ethnicity data on editors, editorial board members, authors, and peer reviewers should follow principles of confidentiality, privacy, and inclusivity and should permit individuals to self-identify or opt out of such identification. The Joint Commitment on Action for Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing is developing an international list of terms for journals and publishers that collect information on race and ethnicity. 32

Journals that collect information on race and ethnicity should not permit editorial decisions to be influenced by the demographic characteristics of authors, peer reviewers, editorial board members, or editors. In addition, the collection and use of such data should respect privacy regulations and be secured to prevent disclosure of personally identifiable information. Individual personally identifiable information of authors and peer reviewers should not be accessible to anyone involved in editorial decisions. Such data may be used in aggregate to benchmark and monitor strategies to promote and improve the diversity of journals.

Corresponding Author: Annette Flanagin, RN, MA, JAMA and the JAMA Network, 330 N Wabash Ave, Chicago, IL 60611 ( [email protected] ).

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Ms Christiansen is chair and Mss Flanagin and Frey are members of the AMA Manual of Style committee.

Members of the AMA Manual of Style Committee : Stacy L. Christiansen, MA, managing editor, JAMA ; Miriam Y. Cintron, BA, assistant managing editor, JAMA ; Angel Desai, MD, MPH, associate editor, JAMA Network Open , and assistant professor, University of California, Davis; Annette Flanagin, RN, MA, executive managing editor, JAMA and JAMA Network; Phil B. Fontanarosa, MD, MBA, interim editor in chief, JAMA and JAMA Network; Tracy Frey, BA, deputy managing editor, JAMA Network; Iris Y. Lo, BA, assistant deputy managing editor, JAMA Network; Connie Manno, ELS, freelance manuscript editing director, JAMA Network; and Christopher C. Muth, MD, senior editor, JAMA , and assistant professor, Rush University Medical Center.

Additional Contributions: We thank the following individuals for their thoughtful review and comments that helped shape this guidance: Nadia N. Abuelezam, ScD, Boston College William F. Connell School of Nursing; Adewole S. Adamson, MD, MPP, Associate Editor, JAMA Dermatology , University of Texas at Austin, Internal Medicine, Division of Dermatology; Dewesh Agrawal, MD, Children’s National Hospital, and Departments of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences; Kristine J. Ajrouch, PhD, Department of Sociology, Eastern Michigan University; Germine H. Awad, PhD, University of Texas at Austin; Maria Baquero, PhD, MPH, senior social epidemiologist, Research and Evaluation Unit, Bureau of Epidemiology Services, Division of Epidemiology, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; Aisha Barber, MD, MEd, Children’s National Hospital, and Department of Pediatrics, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences; Ashley Bennett, MD, Children's Hospital Los Angeles; Howard Bauchner, MD, former editor in chief, JAMA and JAMA Network; Khadijah Breathett, MD, MS, Department of Medicine, University of Arizona; Thuy D. Bui, MD, Department of Medicine, Global Health/Underserved Populations Track, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; Kim Campbell, BS, senior manuscript editor, JAMA ; Jessica Castner, PhD, RN-BC, editor in chief, Journal of Emergency Nursing ; Linh Hồng Chương, MPH, Department of Health Policy & Management, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health; Francisco Cigarroa, MD, Department of Surgery, Director, Transplant Center, UT Health, San Antonio, and JAMA editorial board member; Desiree M. de la Torre, MPH, MBA, Community Affairs & Population Health Improvement, Children’s National Hospital; Christopher P. Duggan, MD, MPH, Center for Nutrition at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School; Torian Easterling, MD, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; Enrique Escalante, MD, MSHS, director of Diversity Recruitment and Inclusion, Children’s National Hospital, and Department of Pediatrics, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences; Lisa Evans, JD, Scientific Workforce Diversity Officer, National Institutes of Health; Olanrewaju O. Falusi, MD, Children’s National Hospital; Stephanie E. Farquhar, PhD, MHS, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; Glenn Flores, MD, Department of Pediatrics, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Holtz Children’s Hospital, Jackson Health System; Barbara Gastel, MD, MPH, Texas A&M College of Medicine, Humanities in Medicine; L. Hannah Gould, PhD, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; Carmen E. Guerra, MD, MSCE, vice chair of Diversity and Inclusion, Department of Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania; P. Michael Ho, MD, PhD, University of Colorado, Aurora; Said Ibrahim, MD, MPH, MBA, Division of Healthcare Delivery Science & Innovation, Weill Cornell Medicine; Omer Ilahi, MD, Southwest Orthopedic Group; Alireza Hamidian Jahromi, MD, Rush University Medical Center; Quita Highsmith, MBA, chief diversity officer, Genentech; Renee M. Johnson, PhD, MPH, Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Kamlesh Khunti, PhD, MD, University of Leicester; Trevor Lane, MA, DPhil, AsiaEdit; Cara Lichtenstein, MD, MPH, Children’s National Hospital; Francie Likis, DrPh, editor in chief, Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health ; Preeti N. Malani, MD, MSJ, associate editor, JAMA , and Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Disease, University of Michigan; Jacqueline McGrath, PhD, RN, School of Nursing, UT Health San Antonio; Michelle Morse, MD, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; Brahmajee K. Nallamothu, MD, MPH, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Peter Olson, MA, manuscript editing coordinator, JAMA Network; Manish Pareek, MD, University of Leicester; Monica Peek, MD, MPH, Department of Medicine, Chicago Center for Diabetes Translational Research, University of Chicago; Jose S. Pulido, MD, MS, MPH, MBA, Wills Eye Hospital, and Departments of Ophthalmology and Molecular Medicine, Mayo Clinic; Zudin Puthucheary, MBBS, PhD, BMedSci, William Harvey Research Institute, Barts and The London School of Medicine & Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London, Royal London Hospital, Barts Health NHS Trust; Sanjay Ramakrishnan, MBBS, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford; Jeanne M. Regnante, chief health equity and diversity officer, LUNGevity Foundation; Allie Reynolds, Princeton University; Ash Routen, PhD, University of Leicester; James B. Ruben, MD, Folsom, California (retired); Randall L. Rutta, National Health Council; Deborah Salerno, PhD, senior medical writer, Salerno Scientific; Kanade Shinkai, MD, editor, JAMA Dermatology , and Department of Dermatology, University of California San Francisco; Erica S. Spatz, MD, MHS, Yale School of Medicine; Jenna Rose Stoehr, BA, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine; L. Tantay, MA, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; Ayanna Vasquez, MD, MS, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; and Jason H. Wasfy, MD, MPhil, Massachusetts General Hospital.

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Flanagin A , Frey T , Christiansen SL , AMA Manual of Style Committee. Updated Guidance on the Reporting of Race and Ethnicity in Medical and Science Journals. JAMA. 2021;326(7):621–627. doi:10.1001/jama.2021.13304

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Challenging Misconceptions about Race in Undergraduate Genetics

• Erin M. Ball
• Robin A. Costello
• Cissy J. Ballen
• Rita M. Graze
• Eric W. Burkholder

*Address correspondence to: Erin Ball ( E-mail Address: [email protected] ).

Department of Biological Sciences, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849

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Department of Physics, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849

Racial biases, which harm marginalized and excluded communities, may be combatted by clarifying misconceptions about race during biology lessons. We developed a human genetics laboratory activity that challenges the misconception that race is biological (biological essentialism). We assessed the relationship between this activity and student outcomes using a survey of students’ attitudes about biological essentialism and color-evasive ideology and a concept inventory about phylogeny and human diversity. Students in the human genetics laboratory activity showed a significant decrease in their acceptance of biological essentialism compared with a control group, but did not show changes in color-evasive ideology. Students in both groups exhibited increased knowledge in both areas of the concept inventory, but the gains were larger in the human genetics laboratory. In the second iteration of this activity, we found that only white students’ decreases in biological essentialist beliefs were significant and the activity failed to decrease color-evasive ideologies for all students. Concept inventory gains were similar and significant for both white and non-white students in this iteration. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of addressing misconceptions about the biological origins of race and encourage more research on ways to effectively change damaging student attitudes about race in undergraduate genetics education.

INTRODUCTION

The belief that racial groups 1 are genetically determined persists among the general public, including health and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) professionals ( Jayaratne, 2006 , 2009 ; Roth, 2023 ). This mindset continues even though it is contrary to scientific understanding of human genetic diversity and the clear sociological and historical context of race categorization ( Norton et al. , 2019 ; Visintainer, 2022 ). This belief, that social, cultural, and other aspects of a person’s identity are attributes of their biological makeup, is known as biological essentialism ( Bailey and Knobe, 2023 ). Scientific understanding of human genetic diversity, however, does not provide support for biologically constructed races ( Smedley and Smedley, 2005 ; McChesney, 2015 ). Furthermore, this misconception is contradictory to the consensus held by most social scientists that race is “a social construct that artificially divides people into distinct groups” (Wijeysinghe et al. , 1997). Those holding fast to the false ideas underlying biological essentialism tend to be more accepting of racial prejudices, believing differences across racial groups arise from individual biological make-ups and not from social constructs ( Bastian and Haslam, 2006 ; William and Eberhardt, 2008 ). Essentialist beliefs about race contribute to the reinforcement of social hierarchies as natural, perpetuating existing hierarchies through bias against marginalized social groups ( Smedley and Smedley, 2005 ; Mandalaywala et al. , 2018 ).

Historically, racial prejudices associated with biological essentialist thinking have been explicit. For example, Charles Davenport tried to prove that personality characteristics and unfavorable traits such as alcoholism and criminality were inherited in Mendelian manner in an attempt to prove a genetic basis for white supremacy ( Allen, 1983 ). However, while explicit prejudices have been declining in the United States over the past few decades ( Dovidio et al. , 2000 ; Charlesworth and Banaji, 2022 ), implicit biases, like color-evasive ideologies ( Bonilla-Silva 2018 ; King et al. , 2023 ), have been growing throughout the socioeconomic and governmental infrastructure of the United States ( Vela et al. , 2022 ) and are even perpetuated by biology instructors ( King et al. , 2023 ). Someone who exhibits color-evasive racist ideologies may claim to not “see” skin color and believe that all outcomes from any given group are based on individual merit, neglecting the systematic inequalities that were previously constructed based on racist ideologies ( Jones, 2016 ). Engaging in color-evasive thinking, which denies the existence of racism, legitimizes the current system and undermines any corrective efforts to address inequities ( Gushue and Constantine, 2007 ).

Both biological essentialist and color-evasive ideologies perpetuate the systemic disadvantage of people of certain races. However, the relationship between biological essentialism and color-evasive racism is currently unknown, as previous studies have only measured the link between biological essentialism and explicit racial biases. Notably, this relationship is hypothesized to be causal ( Mandalaywala et al. , 2018 ). We hypothesize that individuals who understand that race is socially constructed may likewise understand the social ramifications of race, and thus there may be a link between color-evasive racism and biological essentialism. Here, we designed a genetics laboratory activity to address erroneous biological essentialist beliefs about race. We ask how this activity changes student biological essentialist beliefs and whether their color-evasive ideologies likewise shift.

Biological Essentialism in Science

With the persistent misuse of genetics research to justify racism, scientists have actively and outwardly rejected the use of “race” categories in genetic and medical research ( Yudell et al. , 2016 ; Cho et al. , 2023 ). Several prominent organizations have held workshops and launched investigations into the problematic use of race in genomics and medical research (e.g., the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, NASM, 2023; American Society of Human Genetics, Jackson et al. , 2023 ; the National Human Genome Research Institute & National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, 2016). In undergraduate genetics courses, clarifying race as a social construct is rarely emphasized, partially due to instructors being hesitant to talk about race ( King et al. , 2023 ), leaving students to make uninformed inferences about the role of genetics in race categories. Rather, instructors prefer to adhere to a “value-free” curriculum that portrays science as objective and enlightened ( Beatty et al. , 2023 ). We argue that more work needs to be done to address biological essentialism when designing genetics learning activities. Without explicitly addressing this misconception, students may make assumptions about genetic origins of racial groups.

While few studies have directly measured student conceptions of race, those that have found that students frequently conflate race with ethnicity or possess an incorrect and problematic understanding of the term ( Morning, 2009 ). For example, one investigation found many instances in which students agreed with the statement, “There are biological races in the species Homo sapiens ,” ( Morning, 2011 , p. 154). When compared with anthropology students, Morning (2009) found biology students were more likely to define race using physical characteristics. Furthermore, biology students never defined race as socially constructed ( Morning, 2011 ). Previous work also shows an association between race labels used in examples of genetic diseases and increased biological essentialism among students ( Morning, 2011 ; Donovan, 2014 , 2016 , 2017 ; Willinsky, 2020 ). This underscores the need for explicit instruction in biology courses that emphasizes race as a social construct.

Current Approaches to Addressing Biological Essentialism in Biology

Previous research on classroom activities details ways to address student perceptions of race when teaching genetics topics. For example, studies have shown that standard genomics instruction on population genetics can decrease genetic determinism and essentialist misconceptions ( Hubbard, 2017 ; Jamieson and Radick, 2017 ; Donovan et al. , 2021 ) and even racial biases ( Donovan et al. , 2019 ). However, genomics and population genetics are rarely taught in introductory biology or genetics courses ( Dougherty, 2009 ; Redfield, 2012 ; Boerwinkel et al. , 2017 ). Numerous articles underscore the necessity of biology courses addressing misconceptions related to genetics and race, as highlighted by Hales (2020) , Hubbard (2017) , and Beckwith et al. (2017) . Nevertheless, our search yielded limited explicit instances of effective interventions. Donovan et al. (2021) implemented an experimental activity to explain and decrease essentialist thinking among 7th to 12th grade students. In comparison to students engaged in a control activity about climate, students in the treatment group displayed increased genetics knowledge and decreased essentialist perceptions, attributions, and beliefs. While these basic genetics principles such as the DNA “blueprint” metaphor ( Parrott and Smith, 2014 ) or “gene for this disease” language ( Lynch et al. , 2008 ), are important ideas for genetics students to learn, instructors often omit the nuances and limitations of these models for more complex phenomena, such as the failure of Mendelian genetics to describe the inheritance of eye and skin color because the mechanisms of inheritance are much more complex. Donovan found that failure to discuss these nuances can increase essentialism in students ( Morning, 2011 ; Donovan, 2014 , 2016 , 2017 ; Willinsky, 2020 ). Additionally, genetics topics that emphasize differences in humans can potentially set the stage for microaggressions and feelings of alienation ( Hales, 2020 ). There is a clear need to incorporate and test the effects of new activities designed for students in introductory genetics that simultaneously decrease essentialist views while teaching foundational concepts in genetics. Thus, following Donovan’s work, the activity studied here focuses on teaching both fundamental genetics concepts (e.g., phylogeny) while also discussing the limitations and nuances of applying such models to more complex genetic mechanisms (i.e., skin color).

Why Don’t Biology Instructors Talk about Race?

Biology instructors report that teaching about topics such as race can be intimidating due to lack of experience resulting from their own undergraduate exposure to the traditional, “value-free” STEM curricula ( Beatty et al. , 2023 ). However, integrating biological and societal concepts provides students with several benefits, such as opportunities to apply scientific and moral reasoning to real-world contexts ( Hales, 2020 ; Beatty et al. , 2021 ; Costello et al. , 2023 ). Biology educators are uniquely suited to teach about race ( O’Connell et al. , 2022 ) and have been called to do more to address race and racial bias in the classroom ( Donovan, 2022 ). More broadly, creating sustainable change beyond the timeline of an intervention in instructional practices can be challenging, as this requires convincing other instructors of the need for change ( Stark and Smith, 2016 ), providing adjustment time for instructors to feel confident in a new curriculum ( Lewis, 2006 ), and offering vetted curricular materials (e.g., from the journal CourseSource).

Motivating the Current Study

Several prior studies have informed the design and analysis of the activity which is the focus of this study. Culturally relevant pedagogy, defined by Ladson-Billings (1995) , emphasizes student success, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness in teaching behaviors. According to Young (2010) , the role of culturally relevant pedagogy and sociopolitical consciousness is to encourage students to “question, challenge, and critique structural inequalities that exist in society” ( Young, 2010 ). Both Young (2010) and Costello et al. (2023) argue that sociopolitical consciousness is a component of culturally relevant pedagogy that is implemented and reported on less than the other two pillars of culturally relevant pedagogy, student success and cultural competence. Our work aims to increase student sociopolitical consciousness through education on essentialism using a human genetics laboratory. For example, after engaging in discussions that contradict biological essentialism, we ask students to consider the real-world consequences of making assumptions about someone’s race based on physical characteristics (see Supplemental Information).

In developing the laboratory activity and this study, we also used the idea of preparation for future learning ( Bransford and Schwartz, 1999 ; Sears, 2017 ). In preparation for future learning, students attempt an activity or make a prediction (an “invention” activity) before receiving instruction on the scientific consensus. Often, instructors might use contrasting cases to help students identify salient features of mathematical or scientific models to assist them in coming up with models or rules for how systems might behave. This stands in contrast to many student-centered pedagogical activities in which students are first given instruction on the scientific consensus before being asked to apply those ideas to solving problems. Preparation for future learning has been shown to be more effective than an invention activity without a follow-up lecture or a lecture alone ( Schwartz and Martin, 2004 ), as it both draws on students’ prior knowledge and provides timely feedback to cement the understanding of the ideas.

We designed our activity to ask students to make predictions based on their current understanding of human diversity and then use scientific data to determine whether their predictions match the data. Once students finish the activity, the instructor discusses the results with the students to support student learning and explicitly articulate the baselessness of race as a biological concept. This postactivity discussion is an essential part of the activity as the “invention” part of the activity could unintentionally reinforce biases that students might have by asking them to engage in using physical features to identify race or ancestry. The discussion had students reflect on their own misconceptions about race (from the beginning of the activity) and discuss the implications of these misconceptions in their interactions with people of different races.

Scholars of critical race theory suggest that we should acknowledge our positions, biases, and privileges as researchers (see positionality statement below; Pearson et al. , 2022 ). Moreover, we must work to understand and mitigate previous harms done to historically marginalized groups in the name of scientific inquiry and discovery ( Graves, 2003 ; Cech and Waidzunas, 2021 ; Reinholz and Ridgway, 2021 ). Indeed, this study was motivated as a way to counter the harmful ways that genetics and evolutionary biology have been used against marginalized populations. For example, many eugenicists suggested that traits such as criminality were hereditary and linked with race ( Allen, 1983 ). More salient to this context is eugenicists’ focus on the relationship between intelligence and race ( Levine, 2017 ). The belief that white Americans are more intelligent than Black Americans and that intelligence is hereditary persists to this day through stereotype threat ( Brown, 2019 ). We acknowledge this racist past and aim to counter those false ideas through this activity and this research project. Specifically, we hope that, by engaging students with the idea that race is not biological in origin, we can counter harmful stereotypes in the classroom that someone’s race thus determines their intelligence.

Current Study: Measures of Proficiency and Prejudice

Here, we incorporated a self-contained lesson into a single genetics laboratory class and evaluated its relationship with students’ perceptions of race. Human genetics is a suitable context in which to address erroneous beliefs about race, and we used the genetic code to demonstrate how closely related all humans are. In doing so, this laboratory activity targeted the common misconception among biology students that race is biological in origin. However, students may learn to reject the idea that race is biologically derived while still holding racist views and prejudice. In this case, students exhibit “implicit ambivalence,” a change in explicit attitudes after exposure to evidence but without a simultaneous change at the unconscious level ( Bohner and Dickel, 2011 ). In other words, students may be proficient in data-based conclusions that undermine race as a biological concept, while still adhering to prejudice and color-evasive ideologies. We addressed this by distributing a survey consisting of multiple subscales: the subscale targeted the content of the genetics lab exercise by measuring the extent to which students believe that race is biologically derived (i.e., biological essentialism); the second and third subscales measured student prejudice through their beliefs in color-evasive racial ideologies. We also used a concept inventory consisting of two subscales to measure student understanding of the course materials focused on phylogenetics and human diversity.

Stage et al. (2007 ) suggest that racial differences in student outcomes are not measures of student deficiencies, but rather a reflection of bias in the measurement itself or the system in which the students are embedded. While typically applied to performance metrics, scholars have recently extended this to look at changes in affective outcomes such as science identity ( Potvin et al. , 2023 ). In this study, we investigate differences in color-evasive beliefs and biological essentialist beliefs between white students and non-white students. Prior work ( Mandalaywala et al. , 2018 ) has shown differences between white and non-white students’ ideas about biological essentialism. Those authors theorize that race/ethnicity may be more central to the identities of non-white students, and thus a different approach might be needed for different groups of students. In the current study, we were motivated to investigate these differences primarily to determine whether we were inadvertently harming students from non-white racial groups. Furthermore, any observed differences would motivate future studies concerning potential biases in the measurements themselves—such as social desirability bias for white students—as well as whether it is realistic to affect the attitudes of non-white students on race given how pervasive racism is in their daily lives.

The Primary Research Questions Include

To what extent does completing a laboratory about human genetics relate to students’ attitudes about biological essentialism and color-evasive ideology?

How do these results differ between white and non-white students?

We hypothesized that the students who participated in the human genetics laboratory activity would have greater changes in their attitudes about race (both biological essentialism and color-evasive ideologies) than a control group who completed a different activity related to phylogeny. Additionally, we expected less change in color-evasive ideology among non-white students relative to white students because of their lived experiences as members of racialized groups in the United States. We did not have a strong hypothesis about whether white and non-white students would see different changes in beliefs about biological essentialism, though Williams and Eberhardt (2008) found that white and non-white students scored similarly on the original version of their assessment. This is mirrored in our data below. The possible effect of initial racial attitudes on impact of the activity is addressed in our methodology to determine whether students with stronger biological essentialist views initially see more or less change in their beliefs.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

This research was determined exempt from review by the Auburn University Institutional Review Board (Protocol #21-544 EX 2111).

Positionality Statement

As faculty and staff in the fields of biology and physics education, we (the authors) engage in STEM education and research regularly. We believe it is important to understand one’s own position and how that might affect interpretation of the data ( Secules et al. , 2021 ). We identify as white cis -men and women, one author identifies as Jewish, and one author identifies as part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Although we cannot personally relate to the experiences of non-white students, we believe that our positions of privilege and teaching roles in science departments at a relatively conservative institution in the Southeast should be used to advance antiracist ideas. We are aware of the shortcomings in teaching about race in STEM higher education but aim to continue to improve by incorporating inclusive approaches in our teaching and mentoring, studying outcomes, and carefully listening to feedback.

Our study design was motivated by our consciousness to not perpetuate further harm against non-white students. For example, the postactivity discussion emphasized how making erroneous assumptions about race based on physical characteristics can be harmful. Our second research question was not motivated by an attempt to see whether the activity was equally “effective” for white and non-white students but was rather an attempt to ensure that we had not caused harm to non-white students with the implementation of this activity. We also followed-up the first implementation of the activity by interviewing non-white students to get their perspectives on whether this activity was helpful or may have caused harm, rather than relying on our own perspectives and observations. (We note that these interviews are not the focus of this study, but they did give us some confidence in moving forward with the activity.)

Human Genetics Laboratory Activity

We designed the human genetics laboratory activity using the principles of culturally relevant pedagogy and preparation for future learning to explicitly demonstrate that there is no genetic basis for race. Briefly, the activity used computer generated pictures (“Average Faces From Around The World,” 2022) that depict average faces of populations from around the world and asked students to predict the population of origin for each picture, using the five major populations from the Human Genome Project (see Supplemental Material S2: Human Genetics Activity). Students were then assigned one of 11 distinct sets of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), with each set comprising a total of seven alleles derived from genes linked to skin pigmentation.

From this sample of genetic variation, students used the 1000 Genomes Project database to match their set of SNPs to one of the five major populations in an effort to determine which population best matched their SNP set. Using skin pigmentation SNPs and population data from the 1000 genomes project via ensemble.org students estimated the probable population for each set of SNPs (the “invention” part of preparation for future learning). Following the activity, the students engaged in an instructor-led discussion, a crucial element of the activity, that addressed the results of the activity and the inaccuracies in the information they had obtained. The students used seven SNPs from skin pigmentation genes for this activity. In the discussion, they are confronted with information that ancestry tests typically use over 700,000 SNPs and this information remains probabilistic rather than firmly grounded in scientific certainty. We then discussed the complexity of skin pigmentation genes along with an explanation of their results, demonstrating why genes (in this case skin pigmentation genes) cannot be used to determine race. Furthermore, the discussion delved into the misuse of race in medical diagnosis and highlighted the ever-changing nature of racial classifications, often influenced by current political climates. For example, racial classification in the United States has changed as recently 2020, when the U.S. Census allowed citizens to write-in their racial identity, and disaggregated questions about Latino ancestry (U.S. Census, 2020). Finally, we discussed definitions of and distinctions between race, ethnicity, ancestry, and identity, and how these terms are problematically conflated (the explanation part of the activity). Note that we used skin pigmentation as the physical characteristic used to address essentialism as it is the most notable physical feature that people use when guessing about a person’s race ( Cokley, 2007 ).

The control group in this experiment completed a lizard phylogeny activity from HHMI Biointeractive (“Using DNA to Explore Lizard Phylogeny,” 2022). In this lab, students hypothesized how phenotypically similar lizards on different Caribbean islands evolved. Did the phenotypically similar lizards evolve over a single island and then disperse? Or did they evolve independently, yet similarly, on each island? The activity explained what traits allow each type of lizard to thrive in its niche, specifically by comparing five different types of lizards: trunk-ground, trunk, twig, trunk-crown, and crown-giant. The students re-evaluated their previous hypotheses (the “invention” part of preparation for future learning) based on the new information (the scientific consensus explanation). The students then used an online software program to create a phylogenetic tree using mitochondrial DNA that included the NADH dehydrogenase subunit 2 (ND2) gene and five tRNA genes. These genes are highly conserved, allowing one to compare distantly related species, but they are also variable enough to be unique to each individual species. From this tree activity, the students learned that the species of lizards on a single island are more closely related than phenotypically similar species on different islands (the explanation part of the activity). After the activity, the students were led in a discussion on adaptation, adaptive radiation, and convergent evolution. This activity serves as an appropriate control because both activities conclude that grouping by phenotype is inaccurate. In addition, lizards can be grouped, classified, and used in teaching about genetic variation, populations, and phylogenetic relationships without the social and historical contexts and biases that apply to humans.

The human genetics and lizard phylogeny activities were implemented in a genetics laboratory course in the spring and fall semesters of 2022 at Auburn University. This genetics course consisted of eight sections with up to 32 students per section and four graduate teaching assistants, each assigned two sections. In the spring of 2022, E.M.B. taught all eight sections during the week the Human Genetics activity and Lizard Phylogeny activity were completed. The four control sections completed the HHMI Lizard Phylogeny Lab, and the four experimental sections completed the human genetics laboratory. Each graduate teaching assistant oversaw one experimental and one control section to control for any effects of the instructor. Note that the implementation of the activity changed between spring and fall of 2022, which is discussed below under the Research Question 2 heading.

Students were given the option at the beginning of the semester to opt out of the study. Consent forms were signed at the beginning of the semester and stored in sealed envelopes until final grades were submitted. Students were given credit for completing activities, regardless of their choice to participate in the study. In the Spring semester, 149 of 173 students consented to participate and completed all portions of the study.

Students voluntarily completed a survey and concept inventory ( Table 1 ) to assess attitudes and knowledge of phylogeny and human diversity during the first lab of the semester (pretest). The survey covered students’ attitudes toward biological essentialism and color-evasive racism, while the accompanying concept inventory covered conceptual knowledge of phylogeny and human diversity. During the eighth laboratory week of the semester, students either completed the HHMI Lizard Phylogeny Lab (“Using DNA to Explore Lizard Phylogeny,” 2022) or the human genetics laboratory (see Supplemental Material S4 – Lizard Phylogeny Activity). Both took a single 2-hour laboratory class period. Immediately following the laboratory activity, students voluntarily completed the same survey and concept inventory (posttest). After the last lab of the semester, students were asked again to voluntarily complete the same survey and concept inventory (follow-up test).

Racial Concepts Scale (Measure of Biological Essentialism)

Viewing race as biologically derived increases acceptance of racial inequities ( William and Eberhardt, 2008 ). To measure biological conception of race, or the degree to which an individual accepts biological essentialism, William and Eberhardt (2008 ) developed the Racial Concepts Scale. We used confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to determine the scale items included in the single Racial Concepts Scale factor and applied the following criteria: nonsignificant chi-squared, comparative fit index (CFI) > 0.9, Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) > 0.9, standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) < 0.08, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) < 0.08 ( Taasoobshirazi and Wang, 2016 ; Knekta et al. , 2019 ; Shi et al. , 2019 ). We sequentially removed survey items with low correlation values until the remaining items best fit the parameters ( Table 2 ). This reduced the Racial Concepts Scale to seven questions, all using a seven-point Likert scale where one signifies “strongly disagree” and seven signifies “strongly agree” (see Supplemental Material S1, page 6–7). The Racial Concepts Scale used statements such as, “A person’s race is fixed at birth” and “It’s easy to tell what race people are by looking at them.” Many different instruments have been designed to measure genetic determinism and conceptualizations of race ( Keller, 2005 ; Bowling et al. , 2008 ; Williams and Eberhardt, 2008 ; Carver et al. , 2017 ; Tawa, 2017 ; Yalaci et al. , 2021 ; Stern et al. , 2017 ). However, all these instruments have shortcomings when surveying undergraduate students in biology classrooms ( Carver et al. , 2017 ; Yalaci et al. , 2021 ). For example, the scale developed by Carver et al. (2017) had lower levels of internal consistency when asking students about genetic determinism compared with other lines of questioning. They also only collected validity evidence from a sample of ∼300 Brazilian college students, who may respond to these items differently than American students due to cultural and language differences. We selected the Racial Concepts Scale among these instruments, despite limited validity evidence, because the items most clearly aligned with the learning objectives of the activity set forth by the instructor.

Models were deemed acceptable based on overall criterion ( Knekta et al. , 2019 ; Marsh et al. , 2004 ).

Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (Measure of Color-evasive Ideologies)

We used the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) developed by Neville et al. (2000) to evaluate students’ color-evasive ideologies through their awareness of three different racial issues: racial privilege, institutional discrimination, and blatant racial issues. The CoBRAS scale consists of 20 total questions and uses a six-point Likert scale, ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (6). We initially analyzed the CoBRAS factors by exploratory factor analysis (EFA; Knekta et al. , 2019 ). The EFA did not support the blatant racial issues subscale, which was subsequently removed from data analysis. We then used CFA to determine the internal reliability of the racial privilege and institutional discrimination factors ( Table 2 ). The CFA reduced the racial privilege subscale from seven questions to six and the institutional discrimination subscale from seven questions to four. The racial privilege factor, which is reversed scored, measures the degree to which individuals acknowledge the inherent societal benefits of being viewed as “white” ( Lawrence and Bunche, 1996 ). Statements in this subscale include, “Race plays an important role in who gets sent to prison” and “white people in the United States have certain advantages because of the color of their skin.” The institutional discrimination factor measures the degree to which individuals believe that discrimination is embedded in policies that yield unequal access to resources, status, or power for specific groups ( Smedley and Smedley, 2005 ). Statements such as “Social policies, such as affirmative action, discriminate unfairly against white people” and “Racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. have certain advantages because of the color of their skin” are used to measure institutional discrimination. EFA and CFAs were conducted using Jamovi (The Jamovi Project, 2022).

Concept Inventory on Tree Thinking and Human Diversity Concepts

We used a concept inventory that included content from two previously published instruments—one covering basic phylogenetic tree thinking and one related to human diversity—to test whether students understood the core teaching objectives across the control group and the experimental group. We also wanted to determine whether students in the experimental group learned topics related to genetic diversity, which was only a focus in the experimental group. The first part of the concept inventory used the Basic Tree Thinking Assessment created by Baum et al. (2005) , consisting of concepts covered in both groups. The second part of the concept inventory used the Human Diversity quiz (“RACE - The Power of an Illusion. Human Diversity | PBS,” 2022) along with questions about the definitions of race, ethnicity, ancestry, and identity.

Research Question 1: Comparison between Laboratory Activities

Two different scales were combined to create the survey: the Racial Concepts Scale (biological essentialism; Williams and Eberhardt, 2008 ) and the CoBRAS (color-evasive ideology; Neville et al. , 2000 ) ( Table 3 ).

Any student selecting Black, Asian, Native American, or two or more races was considered non-white for the analysis. Students who selected Prefer not to say or other were not included in analysis of data but are included here for completeness.

We used regression analysis to explore how the laboratory activity was related to changes in students’ biological essentialism and color-evasive ideology. Using the spring 2022 data, we conducted stepwise linear regression on each survey construct or factor: the Racial Concepts Scale (biological essentialism), the racial privilege factor and the institutional discrimination factor of the CoBRAS (color-evasive ideologies). The full regression models included the laboratory completed as the independent variable and the change in total score for the construct from the pretest to the posttest (i.e., total posttest score minus total pretest score). To control for potential ceiling effects, we also included the pretest score as a covariate. We transformed both the change in total scores and the pretest scores into z-scores, a measure of how many standard deviations (SDs) each students’ total score or change in score was from the mean. We dichotomously coded laboratory completed, where zero was used for completion of the lizard phylogeny laboratory activity and one was used for completion of the human genetics laboratory activity. We also included an interaction term between laboratory activity completed and pretest score in our regression model. We interpret results from the most parsimonious model. We performed all statistical analyses using IBM SPSS Statistics version 28 (IBM Corp, Armonk, NY) and Jamovi (The Jamovi Project, 2022).

Research Question 2: Differences across Racial Groups

Between the spring 2022 semester and the fall 2022 semester, we made a few notable changes to the activity. First, in fall 2022, all eight sections of the Genetics Laboratory course completed the human genetics laboratory activity (i.e., there was no control section) and were taught by graduate teaching assistants. We made this change for two reasons. First, we wanted to explore whether the outcomes of the human genetics laboratory activity differed by race. As the overwhelming majority of students enrolled in this genetics course are white ( Table 3 ), we decided to increase the sample size of non-white students in our student population by increasing the number of students exposed to the human genetics laboratory activity ( Table 4 ). Second, we wanted to determine whether the efficacy of the activity persisted when taught by graduate teaching assistants, rather than the instructor who developed the activity. In the fall 2022 semester, we used the same survey and concept inventory, but we collected data only at the beginning of the semester (pretest) and immediately following the activity (posttest; i.e., no follow-up data were collected). We also lightly edited the activity in fall 2022 to clarify steps and shorten its length (Supplemental Material S2 – Human Genetics Activity).

Using the fall 2022 data, we used mixed model linear regression analysis to explore whether the relationship between the human genetics laboratory and students’ ideas of biological essentialism and color-evasive ideologies varied across racial groups. For biological essentialism, we included the change in the total score for the Racial Concepts Scale from the pretest to the posttest as the dependent variable; race, the total pretest score for the Racial Concepts Scale, and the interaction between race and the pretest score as fixed effects; and graduate teaching assistant as a random effect. We transformed both the change in total scores and the pretest scores into z-scores in our model. Due to the small sample of non-white students, individual race could not be analyzed. Instead, we dichotomously coded student race, with zero for white students and one for non-white students. We used paired t tests comparing pre- and post- biological essentialism scores for students taught by each graduate teaching assistant to determine whether all instructors’ students had an overall significant change in posttest score compared with pretest score. The choice not to further disaggregate racial data was made not just out of considerations of statistical power, but also considerations of anonymity of the data. Particular students could easily be identified if disaggregated by standard categorizations of race. Though this choice obscures the nuances of racism faced by particular groups (e.g., Asian students being a “model minority” [ Walton and Truong, 2023 ]), we also thought it to be in line with our methodological choice to use skin color as our indicator of biological essentialism in the activity.

We performed a comparable examination for the color-evasive ideology scales, employing mixed model linear regression with the difference between pretest and posttest scores as the dependent variable. The model incorporated the total pretest score for either institutional discrimination or racial privilege, as well as the interaction between race and the pretest score, as fixed effects, using the same dichotomous coding for race. All survey scores were converted to z-scores before analysis and the graduate teaching assistant was considered as a random effect in the analysis.

Note: Regression equations are determined by best-fit model (see Supplemental Table S1 for stepwise regression table); Dependent Variable = Posttest minus Pretest; LC = laboratory completed, where Lizard Lab = 0 and Human Genetics Lab = 1; Pre = standardized pretest score; LC x pre = Interaction term of laboratory completed and standardized pretest score; R 2 is adjusted R 2 ; Coefficient standard error in parentheses; ***, p < 0.001; **, p < 0.01; *, p < 0.05.

FIGURE 1. Spring 2022 total scores and standard error for biological essentialism parsed by which laboratory students completed. Significance is pre to post and pre to follow-up; ***, p < 0.001; **, p < 0.01; *, p < 0.05.

FIGURE 2. Total scores and standard errors for two measures of color-evasive racism parsed by which laboratory students completed. (A ) Measures of Racial Privilege did not differ over time across laboratory activities. (B ). Measures of institutional discrimination did not differ over time across laboratory activities .

Using the same regression model as above, except using follow-up test minus pretest as the dependent variable, we found that the effect of the lab lasts through the end of the course (3 weeks later; see regression tables in Supplemental Material S1, pages 2–5), though the effect is somewhat smaller at the follow-up time point (β = −0.470 instead of –0.782).

Students’ scores on the concept inventory increased from pretest to posttest and from pretest to follow-up for both the phylogeny subscale and the Human Diversity subscale ( Figure 3 ). Even though all students increased their knowledge in both subject areas, students who completed the human genetics laboratory activity had more than a 2-fold increase in their human diversity concept inventory score after completing the activity ( p < 0.001). These students had a slight decrease in their scores for the follow-up assessment but maintained a significant increase ( p < 0.001) in human diversity knowledge several weeks after the activity.

Figure 3. Mean scores and standard error for the concept inventory across both laboratory activities for spring 2022. Significance is from pre to post and pre to follow-up. ***, p < 0.001; **, p < 0.01; *, p < 0.05.

Research Question 2: Impact of Human Genetics Laboratory across Racial Groups

We found a significant effect of race on the change in students’ biological essentialism (β = 0.648 ∓ 0.208; p = 0.017; Table 6 ) after controlling for student pretest scores. Biological essentialism measured by the Racial Concepts Scale decreased for white students but did not for non-white students ( Figure 4 ). All paired t tests were significant for each instructor ( Table 7 ). We further found that race did not affect the change in color-evasive ideology scores, for both the institutional discrimination and racial privilege subscales ( Figure 5 ; Supplemental Table S4). There were also significant increases in both concept inventory scores (see Figure 6 ), and these increases were similar across both racial groups (increases in human diversity scores were d = 1.3 for non-white students and d = 1.4 for non-white students, p < 0.001 for both), though the increase in phylogeny scores was not statistically significant for non-white students ( p = 0.079) due to the small sample size (effect size d = 0.38, size for white students d = 0.31). Finally, we found that for white students, biological essentialism had a moderate correlation with institutional discrimination ( r = −0.36, p < 0.001) and racial privilege ( r = 0.37, p < 0.001) at the pretest, while non-white students did not show this same correlation ( r = 0.081, 0.074, respectively; p > 0.05). At the posttest, correlations were similar for white students ( r = −0.36, 0.46, respectively; p < 0.001), and larger but nonsignificant for non-white students ( r = 0.38, p = 0.25; r = 0.23, p = 0.46).

Note: Regression equation determined by mixed model analysis. Dependent Variable = Posttest − Pretest; Race = Student Race, where white = 0 and non-white = 1; Pre = standardized pretest score; Pre X Race = Interaction term of standardized pretest score and student race; R 2 is psuedo- R 2 ; ***, p < 0.001; *, p < 0.05; *, p < 0.05.

FIGURE 4. Fall 2022 total scores and standard error for biological essentialism parsed by race .

***, p < 0.001; **, p < 0.01; *, p < 0.05.

NOTE: ***, p < 0.001; **, p < 0.01; *, p < 0.05.

FIGURE 5. (A) Fall 2022 total scores and standard error for racial privilege parsed by race. (B) Fall 2022 total scores and standard error for institutional discrimination parsed by race. ***, p < 0.001; **, p < 0.01; *, p < 0.05.

FIGURE 6. Mean scores and standard error for the concept inventory across race for fall 2022. Significance is from pre to post. All increases are statistically significant at the p = 0.001 level except for the increase in phylogeny scores for non-white students ( p = 0.079).

Our genetics laboratory activity addressed misconceptions about the biological nature of race and our results underscore the importance of addressing such misconceptions in undergraduate biology education. Though the false belief that race is associated with distinct genetic markers or traits can be deeply ingrained and persistent ( Richman, 2006 ), after the human genetics activity, students reported decreased agreement with biological essentialism. Despite these positive results, we did not observe any change in social attitudes about race after the human genetics activity. There are several potential explanations for this disconnect including limitations of the Racial Concepts Scale ( Morning, 2009 ) to fully capture students’ beliefs about essentialism or a failure of the activity to lead to more fundamental changes in thinking. This suggests that using quantitative data to support causal relationships between social attitudes about race and biological essentialism needs to be very carefully considered and supported with substantial validity evidence for the constructs being measured in the particular populations studied. These results show the promise of activities that can be used to address misconceptions in biology courses, but also highlight the complexities of challenging students’ attitudes about race.

Biological Essentialism

The findings of our study provide compelling evidence that the human genetics laboratory successfully decreased students’ belief that race has a biological basis. This suggests that the educational intervention effectively challenged and corrected misconceptions related to the biological aspects of race, helping students recognize the lack of scientific basis for such beliefs.

A crucial aspect of this human genetics laboratory activity was the postactivity discussion. Completing the activity without the discussion and clarification could be detrimental to the goals of this study, leaving students to draw their own conclusions, and possibly reinforcing the very misconceptions this activity seeks to dispel. In using preparation for future learning, the explanation (instructor-lead discussion), is vital to the overall learning of the students. Our study exposed potential biases during the activity, which likely prompted students to engage critically with the scientific evidence presented. The postactivity lecture (Supplemental Material S3 – Human Genetics Lecture) also ensured that the students received an accurate interpretation of the results. This design led to a more informed perspective, compared with other studies that did not directly address essentialist views ( Kalinowski et al. , 2012 ; Yang et al. , 2017 ; Zimmerman et al. , 2022 ). Donovan et al. (2021) did address essentialism in their experimental group; however, they state the Standard Genomics Literacy knowledge is needed first. The Standard Genomics Literacy curriculum along with the treatment curriculum constituted a 4-week unit, whereas our activity achieved encouraging results with one 2-hour activity.

Biological essentialism is characterized by race often being incorrectly associated with distinct genetic markers or traits ( Richman, 2006 ). This belief has contributed to the perpetuation of stereotypes, discrimination, and systemic inequalities ( Smedley and Smedley, 2005 ; Mandalaywala et al. , 2018 ). Providing educational content in a genetics class that tackles racial misconceptions not only equips students with scientific knowledge pertaining to societal issues but also has the potential for broader influence as these students venture into the wider world. Students decreased their essentialist beliefs regardless of the instructor (E.M.B. or graduate teaching assistants), suggesting that the laboratory activity itself, rather than the specific teaching style or approach of any particular instructor, drove the change in students’ perceptions. While curricular implementation is important, these consistent results suggest that this educational intervention can play a crucial role in challenging and reshaping deeply held beliefs and attitudes.

Implicit Ambivalence

Counter to the observed changes in students’ biological perception of race, the human genetics laboratory did not substantively alter students’ social attitudes toward race. Specifically, the laboratory activity did not change students’ color-evasive beliefs, as measured by their understanding of racial privilege and institutional discrimination. This may be due to students’ implicit ambivalence , in which people change their explicit attitudes after receiving convincing evidence, but uncertainty remains on the unconscious level ( Bohner and Dickel, 2011 ). Implicit ambivalence often arises when individuals hold contradictory beliefs or emotions about someone or something, and they have not fully processed or reconciled this conflict. Implicit ambivalence can be complex to navigate because it involves unconscious or subtle feelings that may not be readily apparent to the individual experiencing them as it requires a deeper level of self-reflection and exploration to uncover. Applied to our results, implicit ambivalence may explain why the activity, which targeted misconceptions about race as biological, affected students’ understanding of race but not their social attitudes about race. Similarly, Morning (2009) highlights differences between nonessentialist thinking and antiessentialist thinking which provide further context to these results. Nonessentialist thinkers may reject biological assertions about race without connecting those to broader ideas about the socially constructed nature of race (antiessentialist).

Previous studies about the correlation between biological essentialism and racial prejudice have used older measurement scales, such as the Modern Racism Scale, which have explicitly racist statements. However, there have been arguments made that such scales do not reflect current attitudes, which tend toward color-evasive, or color-blind, racism ( Neville et al. , 2000 ). Furthermore, these claims are predominantly correlational, and we could not find any intervention studies that sought to explore this relationship in a more causal manner. If the relationship were causal, one would expect our intervention that successfully changes beliefs in biological essentialism to also translate into changes in color-evasive ideology. Our data suggest that such a causal relationship could exist for white students (given the significant correlations between essentialist and color-evasive beliefs), but the evidence is insufficient as to whether this relationship exists for non-white students. Our results suggest that these may be distinct forms of racist thinking that may require separate or more comprehensive interventions to target. This finding is also supported by constructivist theories of learning, which posit that connections between important ideas need to be made explicit for students to develop more expert-like knowledge organization ( Ambrose et al. , 2010 ).

Non-White Identity

We found that non-white students’ perceptions of race as biological (i.e., the biological essentialism scale) were not impacted by the human genetics laboratory activity, unlike white students’ beliefs. This result was notable because both groups held similar levels of essentialist beliefs before the activity began. QuantCrit suggests that we interpret potential differences between white and non-white students not as non-white students having greater misconceptions about the biological nature of race, but rather a failure of the measurements employed to adequately capture the nuanced views that non-white students might hold on race due to their lived experiences as people of color. Therefore, we use these comparisons to highlight where future research may be needed to address how biology students from different racial backgrounds think about race.

Mandalaywala et al. (2018) conducted a study that showed similar findings: manipulation of essentialist thinking led to changes in racial prejudices in white participants but did not produce similar changes in non-white participants. One theory they gave for the lack of change in non-white participants was that race/ethnicity is a more important part of non-white participants’ identity, particularly at predominantly white institutions ( Hunter et al. , 2019 ), but they also acknowledged that the design of that study may have limited their ability to detect links between essentialism and anti-Black attitudes among Black participants. Similarly, they did not find any studies to support associations between positive racial identity and essentialism. More detailed qualitative research that explores the links between racial identity, essentialism, and educational context would provide much needed clarity on how non-white students engage with nonessentialist or antiessentialist ideas.

Limitations

A central limitation of this research is the small sample size and lack of demographic diversity among students. Future work will benefit from further data collection and an expanded sample size to focus on how these activities might impact non-white students, as well as being able to further disaggregate non-white students. In depth, interviews with participants to gain specific insight into their thoughts and reactions to this laboratory would also enhance this research and will be a subject of a forthcoming study. Although this activity was designed to reach all students and avoid further marginalization of any group ( Blackwell, 2010 ), we cannot determine whether this laboratory made non-white students feel tokenized, less engaged, or otherwise harmed.

Though our results are promising, we are not able to make strong claims about the relationship between activity outcomes and self-reported student racial identity. For non-white students, we did not observe major changes in either biological essentialism or color-evasive racism beliefs. Qualitative analyses and further validity studies may be necessary to explore these scales. The EFA and CFA completed for this research only evaluate internal validity. The scale used for racial privilege and institutional discrimination was extensively validated in 2000 ( Neville et al. , 2000 ) for reliability and validity. However, the majority of the population for the validation study was white. It would be beneficial to update the validation study with a more diverse population. For the biological essentialism scale, three separate sample populations were used to develop the scale ( William and Eberhardt, 2008 ). In the first population, white students made up about half (48%) of the population, the second population was only white and in the third white students were not in the numeric majority (30%). Given the more diverse population used to validate the original biological essentialism scale, we suggest that further qualitative research is needed to understand how non-white students respond to this activity.

Given this study was conducted at a single large R1 University, future research would profit from testing in other institutional contexts (e.g., community colleges, regional institutions, minority serving institutions). Indeed, the student population at this university is unusually racially homogenous and economically privileged compared the national population of postsecondary students. It is also located in a state with a long (and ongoing) history of oppression and segregation against Black people. This may be another reason that we did not find significant impacts on color-evasive ideologies among our students. Additionally, our aggregated non-white population may be very different from non-white populations elsewhere. For example, many of our non-white students were Asian, whereas non-white students at other universities in the state are majority Black.

This research evaluated a genetics laboratory activity that highlighted racial misconceptions prevalent in society. We found that this activity was effective at lowering students’ essentialist beliefs but did not change students’ broader social beliefs about race. We found that the activity was effective at reducing essentialist beliefs regardless of the instructor, suggesting that this activity could have success in other institutional contexts. Future work in more demographically diverse settings would be particularly illuminating, as we found that the activity did not decrease essentialist views of non-white students in our student sample.

We identified a laboratory activity for introductory genetics that significantly decreased essentialist views of students. Our discoveries highlight the efficacy of confronting misunderstandings about the biological foundations of race in genetics education at the undergraduate level. Subsequent research will delve into approaches aimed at diminishing racial prejudices among students.

1 In the context of this paper, when we mention racial categories, we are referring to the racial classifications defined by the U.S. Census Data at the time of publication. We acknowledge that the concept of race is a social construct historically used to assert the superiority of one group over another. As white authors, we recognize that we possess certain privileges not earned through our own actions. It is important to note that while race is a factor we consider, the ethnicity of the participants was not included in the data collection process. Consequently, our analysis relies solely on the self-reported racial information provided by the participants.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research project was supported by the following grants: National Science Foundation (NSF) grant 1751296 (awarded to R.M.G.) and NSF-DUE-2120934 (awarded to C.J.B.).

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Submitted: 14 December 2023 Revised: 23 May 2024 Accepted: 11 June 2024

© 2024 E. M. Ball et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2024 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

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Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education

​The Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education project offers a data-informed foundation for those working to close persistent equity gaps by providing a comprehensive review of the educational pathways of today’s college students and the educators who serve them. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​In 2019, the American Council on Education (ACE) released Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: A Status Report , along with an interactive website   ​created in collaboration with RTI International . In 2020, ACE released a second report, Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: 2020 Supplement . Most recently, ACE released Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: 2024 Status Report .

The reports examine over 300 indicators and draw data from several principal sources, including the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau, and nonfederal organizations. These data provide a foundation from which the higher education community and its many stakeholders can draw insights, raise new questions, and make the case for why race still matters in American higher education.

Visit equityinhighered.org to: 

• Download the full reports
• Download individual report chapters from the 2019 Status Report , 2020 Supplement ,  and 2024 Status Report
• Access downloadable figures and data tables
• Learn from additional ideas and insights exploring the themes of the Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education project
• Browse an extensive collection of resources pertaining to race and ethnicity in higher education 

​​​​The racial and ethnic makeup of the United States has undergone dramatic changes in just the past 20 years. That diversity comes with a host of benefits at all levels of education and in the workforce. Moreover, the current and future health of our nation—economic and otherwise—requires that the whole of our population have equitable access to sources of opportunity.

Chief among such sources of opportunity is higher education. It is therefore imperative that educators, policymakers, community leaders, the media, and others have access to timely data on one of the most salient predictors of higher education access and success in this country: race and ethnicity. 

​This work was made possible through generous funding provided by the Mellon Foundation.​​

​ Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: 2024 Status Report Now Available

Download Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: 2024 Status Report as well as data tables, individual chapters, and previous reports.

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• Race, ethnicity and education "Race Ethnicity and Education is the leading peer-reviewed journal on racism and race inequality in education. The journal provides a focal point for international scholarship, research and debate by publishing original and challenging research that explores the dynamics of race, racism and ethnicity in education policy, theory and practice. "
• Learning for Justice "Our work has evolved in the last 30 years, from reducing prejudice to tackling systemic injustice."
• Whiteness and education " Whiteness and Education publishes outstanding and original manuscripts that advance critical understandings of the construction and deployment of Whiteness in educational contexts. This includes, but is not limited to, critical discussions of White racism, White identity, privilege, power and intersectionality."
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Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching about School Segregation and Educational Inequality

By Keith Meatto

• May 2, 2019

Racial segregation in public education has been illegal for 65 years in the United States. Yet American public schools remain largely separate and unequal — with profound consequences for students, especially students of color.

Today’s teachers and students should know that the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional in the landmark 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education . Perhaps less well known is the extent to which American schools are still segregated. According to a recent Times article , “More than half of the nation’s schoolchildren are in racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of students are either white or nonwhite.” In addition, school districts are often segregated by income. The nexus of racial and economic segregation has intensified educational gaps between rich and poor students, and between white students and students of color.

Although many students learn about the historical struggles to desegregate schools in the civil rights era, segregation as a current reality is largely absent from the curriculum.

“No one is really talking about school segregation anymore,” Elise C. Boddie and Dennis D. Parker wrote in this 2018 Op-Ed essay. “That’s a shame because an abundance of research shows that integration is still one of the most effective tools that we have for achieving racial equity.”

The teaching activities below, written directly to students, use recent Times articles as a way to grapple with segregation and educational inequality in the present. This resource considers three essential questions:

• How and why are schools still segregated in 2019? • What repercussions do segregated schools have for students and society? • What are potential remedies to address school segregation?

School segregation and educational inequity may be a sensitive and uncomfortable topic for students and teachers, regardless of their race, ethnicity or economic status. Nevertheless, the topics below offer entry points to an essential conversation, one that affects every American student and raises questions about core American ideals of equality and fairness.

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Learning how to develop a research question throughout the PhD process: training challenges, objectives, and scaffolds drawn from doctoral programs for students and their supervisors

• Open access
• Published: 15 July 2024

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• Nathalie Girard   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1036-0010 1 ,
• Aurélie Cardona 2 &
• Cécile Fiorelli 3  

With the higher education reform putting forward the professionalization of doctoral students, doctoral education has been strongly focused on generic transferable skills to ensure employability. However, doctoral training should not forget core skills of research and especially the ability to formulate research questions, which are the key to original research and difficult to develop at the same time. Learning how to develop a research question is traditionally seen as a one-to-one learning process and an informal daily transmission between a novice and a senior researcher. The objective of this paper is to offer a framework to design doctoral programs aimed at supporting the process of development of research questions for doctoral candidates guided by their supervisors. We base our proposal on two doctoral training programs designed with a pedagogical strategy based on dialogs with peers, whether they be students, supervisors, or trainers from a diversity of scientific backgrounds. The resulting framework combines three learning challenges faced by doctoral students and their supervisors when developing their research question, as well as training objectives corresponding to what they should learn and that are illustrated by the scaffolds we have used in our training programs. Finally, we discuss the conditions and originality of our pedagogical strategy based on the acquisition of argumentation skills, taking both the subjective dimensions of PhD work and the added value of interactions with a diversity and heterogeneity of peers into account.

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Introduction

With the higher education reform ongoing in the Western world, doctoral education has undergone “a shift from the master–apprentice model to the professional model” (Poyatos Matas, 2012 ), focusing doctoral education on doctoral graduate employability (Cardoso et al., 2022 ) and thus on generic transferable skills (Christensen, 2005 ). However, Poyatos Matas ( 2012 ) warns doctoral educators of the danger of reducing doctoral education to a business or team skills approach, arguing the “importan[ce of maintaining] an adequate balance between skill-based and knowledge-based approaches to doctoral education.” Along the same line, Christensen ( 2005 ) argues that training in transferable skills “should not be overemphasised with respect to original research.” Nevertheless, Poyatos Matas ( 2012 ) does not explicitly explain what the core skills of research, grouped into a broad category referred to as “research skills,” are among seven other skills listed by the European Universities Association’s Salzburg principles.

Among research skills, the way the research question is formulated is critical. As Einstein and Infeld expressed it in 1971 , “the formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution […]. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.” In this article, we consider the development of a research question as a process that consists of determining and reducing the identified problems, whether scientific or socio-economic, and translating them into a relevant and treatable question (Callon, 1984 ). We assume that it is a key process for research activities and a skill that PhD students have to acquire during their PhD experience. However, learning how to develop a research question is far from being easy, as revealed by the multiplication of methodological guides and tutorials on this topic. As researchers and human resource advisors working in a multidisciplinary research institute (INRAE) Footnote 1 , we have also observed many PhD students struggling to formulate their research question, which may seriously inhibit the writing of the final manuscript, whether it be a thesis by publication or not. Some authors have pointed out that the current graduate school education system has largely focused on producing better learners and problem solvers, thus neglecting problem-finding or creativity development in doctoral education (Whitelock et al., 2008 ). Preparing a “research proposal” and developing a researchable question is even recognized as a critical step for doctoral students (Zuber-Skerrit & Knight, 1986 ), becoming a “threshold to cross” during the PhD journey (Chatterjee-Padmanabhan & Nielsen, 2018 ). It thus appears essential to explore the challenges of research question development and how doctoral training programs can contribute to its learning.

The objective of our article is to offer a framework to think about and design doctoral training programs that support the development of research questions for doctoral candidates guided by their supervisors. Our proposal is grounded in two doctoral training programs designed with a pedagogical strategy based on dialogs with peers, whether they be other students, supervisors, or trainers from a diversity of scientific backgrounds. This article is structured into four sections. We present our theoretical background in order to explore the diversity of approaches to develop a research question, laying out our vision of doctoral experience and education, and the way in which the concept of scaffolding has been used in the learning processes that underlie the development of research questions (“ Theoretical background ” section). We then present our methodology, combining an analysis of the literature, our experience in conducting research, supervising and training doctoral students and their supervisors, and our case studies (“ Materials and methods ” section). Our results consist of a framework that combines three learning challenges and the corresponding training objectives, illustrated by scaffoldings we have used in our training programs (“ Results: scaffolding learning challenges for the development of the research question within a thesis ” section). Finally, we discuss the conditions and originality of our proposal based on the acquisition of argumentation skills, with the consideration of the subjective dimensions of PhD work and the added value of interactions with a diversity and heterogeneity of peers (“ Discussion: Enriching peer-learning scaffolding to support the development of a research question as a dialogical process ” section).

Theoretical background

Opening up the process of research question development: a diversity of approaches.

According to the literature about the development of research questions, it is a task that is difficult to formalize and for which several approaches coexist. It may differ according to the disciplines (Xypas & Robin, 2010 ) as well as according to the practical context of the doctoral thesis (i.e., participative research, methodological or fundamental research, financial support). We identified four approaches to research question development:

Gap-spotting (e.g., Locke & Golden-Biddle, 1997 ), the more classical approach, which consists in identifying gaps in existing literature that need to be filled.

Challenging the assumptions underlying existing theory in order to develop and evaluate alternative assumptions. Such an approach aims at coming up “with novel research questions through a dialectical interrogation of one’s own familiar position, other stances, and the domain of literature targeted for assumption challenging” (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2013 ). These authors explicitly adopt a critical perspective of gap-spotting, which they consider as a form of “underproblematization.”

Expressing a contrastive stance to create dialogical space, presented as critical in order to develop a convincing research question (Mei, 2006 ). This approach has addressed the research question formulation by focusing on the writing process.

Problem-solving study based on a negotiation about the “problem framing” involving scientists and stakeholders, and which focuses on practical problem-solving (Archbald, 2008 ).

The literature and our experience show that these different approaches coexist, but do not fall within the same temporality. For example, gap-spotting can be an operation that takes place at the beginning of the research process and which is limited in time, whereas the negotiation of problems between scientists and stakeholders can be much longer and can arise at different stages of the research process. In the same way, challenging existing theories can be a long and incremental process that evolves as the doctoral student acquires new knowledge from scientific literature along the doctoral path or due to an unexpected observation in the field. Trafford and Leshem ( 2009 ) also explain how research begins with a gap in knowledge or professional practices and how research questions evolve with new inputs from the literature, fieldwork, and the progressive establishment of a conceptual framework and theoretical perspectives, to finally end up by proposing a “justifiable contribution to knowledge”. In this perspective, the formulation of a research question can be considered as an incremental path that continues during the doctoral journey.

The knowledge and know-how involved in research question development are thus of a very specific nature (metacognition, implicit, diversity of thinking, etc.), rendering it impossible to design doctoral training programs focused on this complex task as a simple “knowledge transfer”. Moreover, beyond the cognitive learning required, it also refers to more developmental challenges, both for doctoral students and their supervisors, since it is embedded in their specific epistemological and social working situation.

Our vision of the PhD experience and doctoral education

We consider research and, thus, doctoral experience as an activity involving affects, interests, and social networks (Shapin, 2010 ). In line with other scholars (Lonka et al., 2019 ; Sun & Cheng, 2022 ; Xypas & Robin, 2010 ), we argue that doctoral education should rely on a person-centered approach. This means paying attention to doctoral students’ profiles, their perceptions of the academic environment and their professional aims, i.e., the individual contexts of each PhD thesis and the diversity of PhD researchers’ needs and goals (Inouye, 2023 ), as well as their conceptions of research or epistemological backgrounds (Charmillot, 2023 ). We thus consider the PhD process as a professional experience with its multidimensional nature and the distinct quests of PhD students (quest for the self; intellectual quest; professional quest) when navigating their doctoral paths (Skakni, 2018 ).

This type of view leads to a developmental approach of the PhD journey, with doubts, uncertainties, and paradoxes in becoming doctoral researchers, and a “transformation of understanding and of self” (Rennie & Kinsella, 2020 ). Influenced by their personal trajectories and post-PhD goals, doctoral students may thus adopt various approaches in the yearly phase of the PhD process when developing their research projects, whether writing a research proposal constitutes or not a formal step to becoming a full doctoral candidate Footnote 2 . We also consider the PhD experience as a transformative process of a bidirectional nature, for both doctoral students and their supervisors (Halse & Malfroy, 2010 ; Kobayashi, 2014 ).

When it comes to doctoral education, this point of view implies the necessity to combine both generic support and individual guidance, to tailor training and to take each of the doctoral student’s stage of development into account. It also requires that trainers take on the role of facilitators more than those “who know”, in a socio-constructivist approach to learning. Nevertheless, designing doctoral training dedicated to research question development throughout the doctoral journey opens up questions on how to promote such learning in the workplace.

Scaffolding as an adaptive support of learning

In line with Vygotsky’s approach to learning, we consider that the concept of scaffolding can be beneficial to understanding how PhD supervisors can assist their doctoral students in learning how to develop their research question. Firstly defined by Wood et al. ( 1976 ) as a process similar to parents helping infants to solve a problem, this concept has proven to be an efficient pedagogical strategy to support learning in science (Lin et al., 2012 ). It can then be connected to Vygotski’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) ( 1978 ), consisting of tasks that students cannot yet carry out on their own, but which they can accomplish with assistance. Scaffolding has been specified by Belland ( 2014 ) in instructional settings as a “just-in-time support provided by a teacher/parent (tutor) that allows students (tutees) to meaningfully participate in and gain skill at problem solving”. Beyond this use within formal instruction, it has been put forward as “a central educational arrangement in workplace learning”, considered as a “socially-shared situation between master and apprentice” (Nielsen, 2008 ). Scholars argued that scaffolding could also be used to improve higher-order thinking abilities through social interaction, such as argumentation when solving ill-structured problems or when building dialectical arguments.

Three critical features are central to successful scaffolding:

Firstly, the notion of a shared understanding of the goal of the activity is crucial (Puntambekar & Hübscher, 2005 ), requiring an “intersubjectivity” between the tutor and the tutee (Belland, 2014 ), which is reached when they collaboratively redefine the task. The stake here is to make sure that learners are invested in the task, as well as to help sustain this motivation, encouraging them to be informed participants who understand the point of the activity, the value and use of the strategies and “making it worthwhile for the learner to risk the next step” (Wood et al., 1976 ).

Secondly, the tutor should provide the tutee with a graduated assistance based on an ongoing diagnosis of the tutee’s current level of skill, which Belland ( 2014 ) sums up by “providing just the right amount of support at just the right time, and backing off as students gained skill”. Therefore, scaffolding is highly contingent on both the task and the learner’s characteristics, thus being “dynamically adjusted according to tutee ability” (Belland, 2014 ) and requiring the tutor to manage a careful calibration of support (Puntambekar & Hübscher, 2005 ).

Thirdly, scaffolding is successful when the learner controls and takes responsibility for the task, thus moving towards autonomous activity. Scaffolding should then promote this transfer of responsibility, as well as including its own fadeout as internalization progresses.

First focused on the interactions between individuals, the scaffolding concept is now being more broadly applied to artifacts, resources, and environments designed as scaffolds (Puntambekar & Hübscher, 2005 ), with three main “scaffolding modalities”:

One-to-one scaffolding, which “consists of a teacher’s contingent support of students within their respective ZPDs”, considered as the ideal modality with a tailored scaffolding;

Peer scaffolding, which goes beyond the original idea of assistance by a more capable individual (Wood et al., 1976 ) and which hypothesizes that peers can also provide such support;

Computer/paper/artifact-based scaffolding, which emerged as a solution to the dilemma that teachers cannot provide adequate one-to-one scaffolding to all students in a classroom.

Beyond the advantages and limitations of each scaffolding modality, various scholars have discussed the challenges of designing scaffolding in complex environments. It can be a question of taking the heterogeneity of learners into consideration when designing tools (Puntambekar & Hübscher, 2005 ), of building dynamic assessments and fading into the whole environment (Puntambekar & Hübscher, 2005 ; Belland, 2014 ), or of considering the learning environment by combining tools and agents (Puntambekar & Hübscher, 2005 ) in a system of “distributed scaffolding” (Tabak, 2004 ). Lastly, beyond the dyadic relationship between the master and the apprentice, many authors have shown the distributed and collective nature of scaffolding at the workplace (Filliettaz, 2011 ), pointing out the role of “the entire work community” in workplace learning. This enlargement of the concept of scaffolding appears to be especially relevant for the learning of research question development, which is a long process that results from a diversity of interactions, as shown in the previous sub-section.

Existing scaffoldings to support the learning of research question development

In her report of the Bologna seminar on Doctoral Programs for the European Knowledge Society, Christensen ( 2005 ) argues that only training by doing research can provide doctoral candidates with core skills such as “problem solving, innovative, creative and critical thinking”. Until now, the traditional model of doctoral education was based on a supervisor-centered model and a transmission model “where the apprenticeship learns from the master by observation” (Poyatos Matas, 2012 ). Such informal learning thus takes place in private spaces, pointing out the lack of explicit knowledge on “what the academic career involves, the norms, values, and ethics embedded in their disciplines, and the expectations of work habits that they would be expected to meet” (Austin, 2009 ).

Even if this master-apprenticeship model was previously adequate, it turns out to be outdated because of the evolution of doctoral conditions. The increasing control and limitation of PhD duration and the obligation of regular reporting about the progress of the PhD leave less room and time for mimetic and trial-and-error learning. This is especially true in the case of specific doctoral education models such as the PhD by publication, the professional doctorate, the practice-based doctorate (Poyatos Matas, 2012 ), and the case of traditional PhDs. However, most of the time, doctoral students remain “without fully learning how to frame their own questions and design and conduct their own studies” (Austin, 2009 ). It is thus not surprising that the offer of learning supports for PhD students has greatly increased, with a wide diversity of options (handbooks, YouTube channels, writing courses or groups, etc.). Among the diverse training programs offered to doctoral students and sometimes supervisors, some doctoral schools and universities have also created specific training programs to support research question development, while some authors like Inouye ( 2020 ) put forward that training and supervision should include explicit training on the Research Proposal as a “threshold to cross” (see footnote n°2). On the basis of this diversity of offers, we identified three main scaffoldings corresponding to the three main modalities identified in the previous section: artifacts, peer-learning groups (e.g., Chatterjee-Padmanabhan & Nielsen, 2018 ; Poyatos Matas, 2012 ; Zuber-Skerritt & Knight, 1986 ), and supervisors (e.g., Manathunga et al., 2006 ; Whitelock et al., 2008 ).

Following a developmental approach to the PhD process, the present study aims at offering a generic framework to think about and design doctoral programs that scaffold the learning of the development of research questions.

Materials and methods

Building a framework by combining our experiences with the literature.

This research was based on two distinct doctoral training programs that we designed and independently ran over a period of 10 years. Having reflected together on our department’s doctoral training policy, we then progressively formalized the issues at stake in doctoral training and analyzed how our programs responded to them. The importance and difficulties of learning how to develop research questions during doctoral studies then became crucial, leading us to formalize what we had learned from our two programs. In this article, these programs are our case studies, i.e., the situation where we conducted an empirical inquiry to investigate the scaffolding of research question development and from which we can expand and generalize theories on doctoral training (Yin, 2018 ).

For each case study, we combined several methods to collect data:

We used ethnographic techniques (Parker-Jenkins, 2018 ) with a participant observer stance. As researchers conducting research and supervising doctoral students, as HR advisors supporting doctoral students and researchers at INRAE, and as trainers and coordinators in two doctoral training programs, we are involved in prolonged and repeated periods of observation. We thus documented detailed field notes that were revisited as research data.

We built a corpus of pre-existing documents presenting the two doctoral programs (brochures, Website contents, scientific articles, time schedules and targeted objectives at each sequence). For each document, we carried out an open-coding operation to identify the narratives about research question development.

We gathered feedback spontaneously expressed by the trainees during the training courses, the hot debriefs occurring at the end of each course, and training assessments one month after the course, as well as in the course of our activity (in individual HR interventions or in reading the acknowledgements of a PhD thesis).

In parallel with data collection, we carried out a review of the literature on the evolution of doctoral education and the emerging learning challenges for doctoral students and their supervisors, some epistemological articles on research question development and the process of doctoral experience, empirical articles describing training for research question development and seminal articles, and reviews on scaffolding in education sciences. We undertook a cross-reading of this literature to build a conceptual framework identifying the key concepts to study training for research question development: scaffolds, scaffolding objectives, learning challenges, and scaffolding practices. We then analyzed our data to identify the scaffolds mobilized in each case study, the objectives of this scaffolding, and the learning challenges of research question development considered as a scaffolding system. Finally, we characterized our scaffolding practices, i.e., the way in which we, as trainers, concretely support the learning required to achieve the challenges of research question development. Both training programs result from a continuous improvement process based on the feedback of the trainees: with such feedback and our own observations, we were thus able to identify and select the most effective teaching methods in line with our objectives to support the learning of research question development. Behind the classical scaffolding modalities identified in the literature, we chose to identify the diversity of very contextual scaffolding practices and devices used, which we then linked to our training objectives. For each program, we also detailed how these objectives relate to the larger learning challenges of research question development. This led us to formalize a generic grid, which was tested and improved by using it to describe each of our programs.

Two doctoral training programs as case studies for cross-analysis

As a public research institute, the main goals of INRAE are to produce and disseminate scientific knowledge, with a specific focus on the contribution to education and training. Given the broad field of competences within INRAE devoted to the development of agriculture, food and the environment, and its inherent multidisciplinary nature, the thesis defended may draw from extremely various disciplines, ranging from molecular biology to sociology, with a dominance of life and environmental sciences. Moreover, INRAE is a targeted research institute that works with and for various partners in higher education and research, industry, and the agricultural sector and regional governments. This means that many research projects, including doctoral research, are designed and carried out within partnerships with these various stakeholders. INRAE doctoral students are supervised by INRAE researchers, mainly within complex multidisciplinary supervision teams together with French or international academic partners.

In this context, we have developed our vision of research activity and doctoral experience (see the “ Our vision of the PhD experience and doctoral education ” section) and have been designing, improving, and leading two doctoral training programs for more than 10 years (Table  1 ), which share common postulates such as the following:

Considering the PhD process as a part of the professional trajectory.

Aiming at supporting autonomy of doctoral students through the enhancement of their capacity to defend the choices they have made to build research questions, thus also aiming at helping supervisors to adopt a companionship stance.

Considering research question development as an activity, which implies the choice of pedagogical principles based on action learning rather than knowledge transfer.

Considering diversity as an asset, we base our training programs on multidisciplinary workshops.

Nevertheless, they differ in terms of the training audience and times of training in the PhD process:

Course A is only open to doctoral students of the ACT Footnote 3 division of INRAE, whereas course B trains both doctoral students and their supervisors belonging to the different divisions of INRAE.

Doctoral students may attend course A three times during their thesis, whereas course B is designed to train doctoral students once during their thesis, at the end of the first year.

Results: scaffolding learning challenges for the development of the research question within a thesis

In this section, we present a generic framework to think about and design doctoral training programs with the aim of scaffolding the learning of research question development. It combines learning challenges (LC) faced by doctoral students and their supervisors when formulating their research question and training objectives (TO) corresponding to what the participants should learn. We also illustrate how each of these TO can be scaffolded, drawing on some examples from our training programs.

First challenge: to empower doctoral students in the development of their research question, guided by their supervisors

As a professionalization period, the PhD process is considered as a peer-learning process (Boud & Lee, 2005 ) that relies on a mentoring relationship that aims at developing the autonomy of the young researcher (Willison and O’Regan, 2007 ). Developing doctoral agency (Inouye, 2023 ) and, more specifically, promoting a subject-centered approach (Sun & Cheng, 2022 ) to research question development is the first learning challenge that we identified. We then consider that the doctoral student is the one who makes the subject evolve, who reflects and chooses the components of the research question. We divide this first learning challenge into three training objectives and various sub-objectives (see Fig.  1 ), one focused on the doctoral student, one on the supervisor, and one on their relative roles.

Training objectives set out for the challenge: “to empower doctoral students in their research question development”

First, the doctoral student needs to understand the expectations, nature, and difficulties of PhD research and, specifically, of research question development (TO1). This encompasses the sub-objective of understanding the iterative and unplanned nature of the research process as well as making it clear with their supervisor(s) how their creativity can be expressed regarding institutional or financial constraints. For many authors, problem finding or identifying and describing a research question is part of doctoral subjective creativity and a key for an original contribution to knowledge. At the same time, we observe, as other scholars (Brodin, 2018 ; Frick, 2011 ; Whitelock et al., 2008 ) have, that there is a lack of explicit expectations on creativity in doctoral education, which is then limited by scholarly traditions and institutional requirements. During research question development, “standing at the border between the known and the unknown” Footnote 4 can put doctoral students in a situation of uncertainty about their identity and purpose (Trafford & Leshem, 2009 ). For Frick ( 2011 ), doctoral becoming requires an alignment between “how students view themselves in relation to the research process of becoming a scholar (ontology), how they relate to different forms of knowledge (epistemology), how they know to obtain and create such knowledge (methodology), and how they frame their interests in terms of their values and ethics within the discipline (axiology)”. At the crossroads between these four dimensions, research question development is thus a key process that stimulates doctoral student becoming and that requires the support of supervisors so that their students can understand what is expected of them. Knowing that this can be a source of stress for doctoral students, we put the subject of “what is a research process” up for discussion between supervisors and students in course B. After discussing with other students on their perception of creativity in their thesis, students are invited to watch, together with their supervisors, a video calling for scientists to stop thinking of research as a linear process from question to answer but, instead, as a creative and eventually sinuous path (see footnote n°4). Students often express a sense of relief later on when they work with their supervisors on the second reformulation of the thesis subject. In this way, doctoral students become aware that a formulation is likely to evolve during the thesis and feel more comfortable about formulating one that is in no way definitive at the end of the course. In the same way, in course A, we invite the second-year PhD students to work on the transformation of their research subject in order to illustrate its evolution. We ask them to write the formulation of their subject as worded in the PhD offer or initial PhD contract and the formulation that they would use today to describe it. We then collectively work with the other PhD students at various stages in their thesis to identify the differences between the two formulations, so that the concerned second-year PhD students may explain their choices, eventualities, or constraints that led to the transformation of the subject. During debriefs, trainees express that this exercise helped them to understand that this transformation is an integral part of the research process.

This learning challenge also implies that doctoral students and their supervisors clarify their respective roles regarding research question development (TO2). The degree to which supervisors encourage doctoral students to think and act autonomously has been shown to be associated with students’ supervision satisfaction and greater research self-efficacy (Overall et al., 2011 ). This can be done firstly by clarifying the distinction between the supervisor(s)’s research project, professional career issues and those of the PhD. In course B, asking the doctoral students and their supervisors to describe and discuss the thesis supervision ecosystem has been observed as one of the crucial steps in this clarification of their respective roles in research question development. For doctoral students, research question development also implies that they take ownership of the subject, whereas it was often initially written by the supervisors. In course B, the rule “letting the student speak first” has been expressed by doctoral students as very useful for taking on the role, especially during the three workshops focused on the formulation of the thesis subject. In course A, we ask the doctoral students to present the professional context of their PhD (research project, subsidy, disciplines of the supervisors, proximity of the supervisors to the subject, etc.). This presentation helps the trainees to clarify the contextual framing of the PhD students’ theses, as well as the margin of freedom. For their part, supervisors need to let the PhD students develop their research question by themselves and find the right stance, with a careful balance between “hands-off” and “hands-on” (Gruzdev et al., 2020 ). In course B, supervisors first exchange between themselves about what it means to supervise a thesis and their role in the PhD process. The three reformulation workshops are then practical opportunities to take on this role: experiencing this role of being a support and not the leader of the PhD project is sometimes seen as difficult by supervisors who are used to being research project leaders, but they also admit that it is a necessary step to experience the supervision stance.

Supervisors also need to understand the challenges faced by PhD candidates in the development of research questions (TO3) by first abandoning the assumption of the already autonomous student (Manathunga & Goozée, 2007 ). According to Halse and Malfroy ( 2010 ), the supervisor is “responsible for recognizing and responding to the needs of different students”, within a “learning alliance” with the student. When it comes to formulating their research question, it becomes important to be able to situate their own role with their values and desires in the research process, in general, and, in particular, in the development of the research question, which is not just made up of rational intellectual choices. For this objective, supervisors have to be able to clearly identify the doctoral student’s state of progress in the development of the research question within the thesis and, more broadly, the doctoral student’s values and desires in doing research (Skakni, 2018 ). In course B, we ask them to step back and remain silent (even stolid!) when their doctoral students present their subject. While listening and writing down their observations, they foster their understanding of the states of progress and the orientations chosen by the students. With this rule, we then observe that most of them are able to adopt the correct stance for later workshops when they are asked to work with students on their research question.

Second challenge: to be aware of the various forms and processes of research question development within a diversity of ways of doing research and to be able to situate oneself in this diversity.

The second learning challenge focuses on making the PhD students (and their supervisors) aware of the diversity of ways of doing research and especially various forms and processes of research question development (see the “ Opening up the process of research question development: a diversity of approaches ” section) and situating oneself in this diversity. Many authors argue that doctoral education should highlight scientific pluralism (Pallas, 2001 ), opening the epistemological doctoral experience in order to question the implicit norm of neutrality of the positivist ideal (Charmillot, 2023 ). This is particularly true when it comes to the development of research questions for “wicked problems” (Rittel & Webber, 1973 ), i.e., economic, political, and environmental issues involving many stakeholders with different values and priorities. In this context, developing research questions often requires analysis at the crossroads between several disciplines (Bosque-Perez et al., 2016 ) and between different social stakes (Manathunga et al., 2006 ). It requires reinforcing a scientific culture favorable to this practice of multi-/inter-/transdisciplinarity (Kemp & Nurius, 2015 ), then making interdisciplinary research skills a part of graduate education (Pallas, 2001 ; Bosque-Perez et al., 2016 ). Doctoral students then have to develop their awareness about the diversity of forms and processes of research question development, requiring that they are able to understand this diversity, to know how they themselves relate to different forms of knowledge (Frick, 2011 ), and to acknowledge their performativity in the world.

Within this second learning challenge, we distinguish four training objectives (Fig.  2 ), all concerning doctoral students and their supervisors.

Training objectives for the challenge: “to be aware of the diversity of ways of doing research, to be able to situate oneself in this diversity”

Both of them need to understand and respect the diversity of research stances (TO4). In both of our case studies, we ensure that a diversity of disciplines is represented in each working group, and we guarantee the mutual respect among them. We facilitate the expression of all doctoral students about how they are developing their research question, thus illustrating the diversity of research stances. During the hot debrief of course A, trainees regularly point out the discovery of this diversity as a positive outcome, which helps them to situate their own work. Moreover, discussing research question development within small and heterogeneous groups in terms of disciplines is experienced by participants as a strength “to take a step back and clarify key points” (student, course B, 2017), acknowledging that “working with other disciplines, it helped us to refocus and clarify the subject” (supervisor, course B, 2023).

Doctoral students and their supervisors also need to be able to formulate questions and clearly explain the doctoral research project, especially the way they develop their research question, whatever their discipline may be (TO5). This is why active participation is required in the workshops in both case studies, putting doctoral students and supervisors in the position of an active learner, not a passive trainee. Since such workshops may be very demanding for the PhD student and might be emotionally intense, it is of utmost importance that the trainers carefully manage the collective discussion, guaranteeing trust, mutual respect, and achieving balance in speaking. In particular, doctoral students and their supervisors are the ones who know the scientific community(ies) to which they will contribute and are the only ones who can assess the relevance of the subject. Participants are then asked to question the PhD students without calling the relevance of their theses into question. When aiming at promoting the expression of PhD students as human subjects , trainers have to pay particular attention to the fact that participants do not reformulate the subject for the students but, on the contrary, help them to open up the possibilities, to sort out, and to clarify the status of the elements presented. Trainers also use expression modes such as the questioning forms (open/closed questions), the subject pronouns used (I/we), and the origin of the arguments or events expressed by the PhD student as points of vigilance for managing the group discussion and as levers to go deeper into the questioning and analysis of the PhD students’ thinking about their research questions.

They both have to examine (in their own research and that of others) the place of stakeholders in the development of the research question (TO6). In course A, we use the conceptual framework of translation from Callon ( 1984 ) to analyze how a social problem can be translated into a research question. In course B, the framework given to trainees to develop their research question specifically points out the distinction to be made between the academic research stakes and the stakes for society. They also have to understand how the diversity of ways of scientific knowledge production perform or do not perform in problematic situations (TO7).

Third learning challenge: to know how to develop their research question throughout the research process

The third learning challenge concerns the staggered process of formulation of the research question throughout the PhD process. For many authors, the formulation of a “researchable question” or “research conceptualization” (Badenhorst, 2021 ) by the doctoral student is the first step in the doctoral research process with the writing, and sometimes formal presentation, of a “research proposal”. It is often seen as a threshold in the doctoral journey (Chatterjee-Padmanabhan & Nielsen, 2018 ) and a key feature of “doctorateness”, combining gaps in knowledge, contributions to knowledge, research questions, conceptual frameworks, and research design (Trafford & Leshem, 2009 ). For Frick ( 2011 ), the preparation of a proposal requires background reading and “demarcation of the research question”. It consists in knowing to which scientific issues the thesis will contribute and in identifying the relevant disciplinary concepts. Mastering the various modes of communication in the development of a research question is of utmost importance for PhD students, enabling them to accurately formulate their research question (Lim, 2014 ), as well as to take most of their supervisors’ or other researchers’ (colleagues, reviewers) feedback into consideration (Carter & Kumar, 2017 ). More widely, knowing how to formulate their research question is not sufficient without being able to step back from their own formulation. Boch ( 2023 ) expresses it as a necessary reflexivity in research writing, which means becoming aware of oneself in research and integrating this experience into the writing in an argumentative and convincing way. Stepping back from their research question also puts forward the need for doctoral students to be clear about the translations and reductions made (Callon, 1984 ), their research strategies (Inouye, 2023 ), or research stances (Hazard et al., 2020 ).

This learning challenge includes three training objectives (Fig.  3 ), two of them concerning the doctoral student and the third one concerning the students and their supervisors.

Training objectives for the challenge: “to know how to express their research question throughout the research process”

Doctoral students must clearly lay out the research stakes (both academic and for society) throughout their thesis process (TO8). In course B, we give learners a framework to think about and discuss research question development as a combination of three main ingredients (operational and scientific stakes, research question, strategy), requiring that students make the difference between the scientific stakes and the thesis objective clear, while defining the scope of the thesis within broader issues (European project, lab project). In course A, the conceptual framework of the translation from Callon is useful to recognize the driving forces of the reductions and translations in order to identify them and their consequences on the formulation of the research question. It helps clarify their research practices and understand how they contribute to the development of the research strategy, beyond what has been done so far. In course A, we use a trajectory to identify the consistency and the sense of the various research practices of the 3 rd year PhD students. In course B, the “research strategy,” viewed both as a “realized” and “planned” one (Mintzberg, 1987 ), is useful as both a hindsight (what have been my choices so far?) and planning tool (how to reach my research objective as I can express it today?), allowing students to put the weight of their thesis schedule into perspective.

In order to progress in their reflection, the doctoral students need to understand the importance of different oral and written (scientific or not) communications for making the formulation of their research question evolve (TO9). In course A, when designing the trajectory of the 3 rd year PhD students, we question them about their scientific communications or articles and about the consequences they had on the evolution of the formulation of their research question. We also ask them about the impact of the different feedback they had at the time of these communications and articles (from peers, from supervisors and other researchers, and from stakeholders) on the development of their research question. In course B, there are three exercises focused on the research question. While being considered as difficult, these exercises are also seen by trainees as effective for training themselves in expressing (orally and then on a written basis) their own subject and receiving feedback and questions from other students and their supervisors. We can observe that research questions and soundness of argumentation deeply evolve throughout the week, to the great satisfaction of students and their supervisors.

Doctoral students, as well as their supervisors for the research carried out under their responsibility, have to understand and explain the consequences of research question choices on the ways knowledge produced in the thesis could be used in the real world (TO10). In course A, we use a heuristic tool to help PhD students to understand the relevance for action of the knowledge they generate (Hazard et al., 2020 ).

Discussion: enriching peer-learning scaffolding to support the development of a research question as a dialogical process

Learning how to build a research question is traditionally seen as a one-to-one learning process based on informal and daily transmission between a novice and a senior researcher. In order to open up this informal process, we have grounded our pedagogical strategy in multiple opportunities for dialog with peers, whether it be other students, supervisors, or trainers. Taken as a whole, it thus combines interdisciplinarity, peer-learning, and dialogical principles that result in the construction of an “overall distributed scaffolding strategy” (Belland, 2014 ) and that create synergy between peer scaffolding, one-to-one and media scaffolding (Belland, 2014 ).

Firstly, our case studies emphasize speaking and argumentation skills rather than writing competencies. Many research works like Zuber-Skerritt and Knight ( 1986 ), Maher et al. ( 2013 ), Kumar and Aitchison ( 2018 ), and Badenhorst ( 2021 ) have explored the needs and modalities of doctoral education in terms of writing, even from the supervisor’s perspective (González-Ocampo & Castelló, 2018 ). Our pedagogical choice contrasts with this focus on doctoral writing since we give trainees many dialogical opportunities to train themselves to orally express and defend their intellectual autonomy. Doing so, we join Cahusac de Caux et al. ( 2017 ) who argue, “peer feedback and discussion benefits students by helping them verbalise their internal reflective thinking, fostering reflective practice skills development”. Even if we use some media-based scaffoldings, tools are not at the core of our case studies: our objective is instead to help trainees to put their thoughts into words, in line with the cognitive apprenticeship of Austin ( 2009 ), referring to a specific kind of apprenticeship for the less easily observed processes of thinking.

Secondly, our training programs make the most of the diversity and heterogeneity of peers, whether they be more or less experienced in supervision, from various disciplines, or at different stages of their thesis, thus enriching peer-learning scaffolding. All the participants, in their capacity as scientists, are considered as peers who are able to understand the work of other researchers, regardless of the discipline and the thesis subject. It is also by striving to understand and question subjects that are sometimes far from their field of research that researchers acquire the capacity for analysis, synthesis, and hindsight that is necessary in research work. By setting up dialogical spaces to help inexperienced researchers hone their argumentation skills, our training programs implement our view of research in practical terms as a collective process and of doctoral education as a professional socialization process, thus requiring that research organizations facilitate collective practices in the workplace (Malfroy, 2005 ). Moreover, with the inherent heterogeneity of participants, these workshops also constitute places where the multidisciplinarity and plurality of the sciences are experienced firsthand, convergent with Manathunga et al. ( 2006 ) or Bosque-Perez et al. ( 2016 ). Doing so, we are taking part in the debate of whether scaffolds need to contain domain-specific knowledge (Belland, 2014 ) by saying that there is no need for discipline or domain-specific scaffolds. Moreover, being active on one’s own case as well as on others’ situations is an efficient training strategy to move away from the objects and routines of a discipline or community when expressing ideas between specialists. Such collective reflexivity, sometimes turning into an analysis of professional practices, is a classic vocational training principle known to enhance the development of professionalization in the long term. What we add in our training sessions is the heterogeneity of participants, which is a resource for reflexivity, but that has to be carefully managed.

Thirdly, trainees are considered as human subjects engaged in their PhD with their various motivations and professional projects, which can strongly impact the way they see their thesis and envision their research work (Skakni, 2018 ), as well as their affinities and values, their doubts, and fears. Thanks to our focus on oral exchanges, we are then able to reveal and deal with these subjective dimensions of PhD work, which are often hidden when training PhD students in scientific writing. More precisely, expressing one’s doctoral experience and professional situations experienced is known as an efficient scaffolding practice within the collaborative reflective writing of “learning journals” with peer feedback (Boldrini & Cattaneo, 2014 ). We have shown how to implement such scaffolding in small groups of doctoral students with the facilitation of experienced researchers.

However, our proposal requires that some binding conditions be met:

Learning to formulate a research question through dialog with peers requires spending time, in our case, 4 full days, within small groups to ensure that everyone can take part in it and take advantage of the feedback of others.

This dialog is made possible and emphasized by the diversity of participants (either in terms of discipline, stage of the thesis, experience, etc.).

Managing both the human and scientific conditions of this dialog requires reflexive and open-minded trainers that adopt a facilitating stance.

As a result, our perspective on scaffolding is not merely an issue of training technique but, on the contrary, a situated perspective that echoes the view of Nielsen ( 2008 ) on training “both as part of a social practice and as part of the learner’s trajectory of participation”, within an expansive process inspired by Engeström’s work. With this developmental view on doctoral experience, we acknowledge that research question development is a process that goes beyond the limited time of a 4-day training program. Trainee feedback collected after their participation in course A or B revealed that they continue the work begun during the training programs, on the basis of the given scaffolding (e.g., “I feel that we familiarized ourselves with these tools [referring to the concepts of translation and reduction] because we work on them and I started to think. […] I know these tools will remain in my head until I write my thesis and that I really learned a lot” Hot debrief, course A, 2016). It is also not rare that trainees mention their participation in course A or B to their PhD steering committees as having helped to frame/define their research question. Course A or B is also frequently mentioned as an essential support in acknowledgement of their PhD thesis. Although limited in time, the training programs studied in this article act as an accelerator in research question development (e.g. course B “we saved several months”, supervisor, 2017, “In just 2 days, everything became much clearer and more focused”, student, 2021). We thus assume that they contribute to awareness and reflexivity on research activity and to the professional development of trainees, which is particularly crucial in France with the pressure put on thesis duration and the absence of formal recognition of the research proposal stage.

Our experience puts forward two avenues for future research. Firstly, bringing together doctoral students at different stages of their thesis and then offering them the opportunity to participate each year of their PhD process opens a window on to their intellectual trajectory and a situated adjustment of our scaffolding practices. Secondly, training doctoral supervisors—and trainers involved in these doctoral programs—remains of utmost importance to make scaffolding last and be adapted throughout the next months and years.

This study examined the learning challenges and objectives required for the task of research question development throughout the PhD process, both for doctoral students and their supervisors. We have drawn some lessons for the scaffolding of these challenges and objectives from two different doctoral training programs that we have been designing and leading for more than 10 years.

Considering the development of a research question as a dialogical process, we suggest three conditions to scaffold these learnings: firstly, offering many dialogical opportunities is an effective way for students to train themselves to express their intellectual autonomy and to defend their research project; secondly, making the most of the diversity and heterogeneity of peers, whether they be more or less experienced in supervision, from various disciplines, or at different stages of their thesis, thus enriching peer-learning scaffolding, proved to be beneficial when the multidisciplinarity and plurality of the sciences are experienced firsthand; and finally, giving priority to oral communication allows trainers and trainees to reveal and deal with the subjective dimensions of PhD work and their various motivations and professional projects that always underlie the development of a research question. Taken as a whole, our work seriously rises to the challenge of training reflexive researchers with an acute awareness of the collective nature of research and an intellectual openness to the plurality of sciences.

INRAE, the French public research institute devoted to the development of agriculture, food and the environment ( https://www.inrae.fr/en ), continuously hosts some 2000 PhD students.

For example, in the UK, writing and defending a research proposal allows a Transfer of Status from an initial probationary status to that of a full doctoral candidate (Inouye, 2020 ), whereas in France, there is no such formal assessment.

The ACT research division of INRAE aims at understanding and supporting transformative changes in socio-ecosystems and agrifood systems, which take actors’ practices and strategies into account in order to promote sustainable innovations and transitions, particularly at the territorial level.

As Uri Alon puts it in his TED video: “Why science demands a leap into the unknown” https://www.ted.com/talks/uri_alon_why_science_demands_a_leap_into_the_unknown .

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How far we haven’t come? Racial disparities in education today

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, beth stone bs beth stone managing editor, brown center chalkboard.

June 14, 2016

On June 8, the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings hosted a public event to discuss the intersection of race and education in 2016. With “ Bringing education disparities to the forefront of the political debate ,” a panel of community leaders and education experts gathered to discuss the importance of seizing the opportunity afforded by the ongoing national dialogue around racial and economic inequities. The event covered a lot of ground by highlighting how far we have come but how far we still need to go.

Disparities in education are vast:  “We could be here for weeks”

Panelists spoke at length about many pressing issues in K-12 education, with a main topic of discussion being how to bridge the achievement gap between white and non-white students. Brown Center Deputy Director Michael Hansen addressed the lack of diversity among America’s teachers, which he says will become worse as America’s racial demographics continue to change. He argued that direct policy intervention is necessary to address this issue because, “based on the numbers…it’s just not happening.”

Peggy McLeod, Deputy Vice President of Education and Workforce Development at National Council of La Raza, spoke about Latino children in America’s schools, who account for a quarter of all children in the United States. She noted the success of the Latino community in raising graduation rates and college enrollment, but also referenced the ongoing issues of retention and access to academic resources.

American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Gerard Robinson affirmed the reality of racial disparities in education. He pointed to 2013-2014 civil rights data collection from the U.S. Department of Education (released the day before the event), saying that the data “shocked some people, for others it was a yawn.” Robinson cautioned against addressing only inequities between white students and black and Latino students, as such comparisons not only exclude Asian-Americans (the so-called “model minority”), but also gloss over issues that exist within groups and states, for instance.

DeRay Mckesson, a former teacher and a Black Lives Matter Political Activist and Organizer, discussed  how recruiting, training, and retaining better teachers is an important part of solving these issues, but the problem runs deeper. Returning to the achievement gap, Mckesson said that the gaps between racial communities have been allowed “to fester for so long,” and that “the K-12 issue is only part of the puzzle.” Before educational inequalities can truly be fixed, there must be an understanding of “the deeper racial history” that allowed such disparities to form and grow. 

Struggling schools need good teachers. How can we get them there?

Panelists turned to the issue of teachers and how they can be recruited and trained to work in the school systems that are most in need of aid. Hansen raised the idea of higher compensation for teachers who go to struggling schools. Although there may be collective bargaining issue to overcome, incentivizing teachers to go to certain districts could attract and keep good teachers, improving the quality of education.

McLeod added that much of the problem in diversifying schools comes from the devaluation of teachers within America, a trend that has continued for decades. She recommends that teachers begin work with a higher base salary. Moreover, the social importance of teachers should be recognized as well, as “teachers don’t work until three o’clock and go home.” Properly valuing the services that teachers provide is a key way of bringing more people, including Latinos, into the profession.

“Teachers don’t work until three o’clock and go home.”

Robinson agreed that paying teachers higher salaries is an effective way of putting better teachers in struggling schools. He also recommends that states create incentives for National Board certified teachers to work at high-need schools. The bigger issue, he says, is that the supply of teachers will not be able to keep up with population trends. “Instead of trying to birth teachers, we must invent teachers.” Incorporating technology could be one way to spread teachers’ services across the country.

Mckesson focused on school culture rather than teacher pay, as teachers are more willing to work in schools that have a productive and positive atmosphere. Creating such schools requires a strong community of leaders and most school systems struggle to develop an optimal recruitment and placement system to match them with where leaders can work best. He also suggested some burdensome, yet structural solutions, pointing to his experiences working to diversify teachers in Minneapolis:  “We were not hiring teachers of color, it was really bad.  And we made the commitment… to interview every single teacher that applies, which was like a wild commitment…it was not easy to do but we did it, and it changed the face of teaching in Minneapolis because we were just, we were missing people.”  

Teaching the intangibles: Should schools cultivate “grit” in their students?

Moderator Alia Wong, Associate Editor at The Atlantic, questioned panelists about the recent, popular buzzword in education circles: grit. McLeod was skeptical, believing the term to be another education fad that would come and go. Robinson believed that simplifying the solution to education problems through such terms ignores the full extent of the issues.  He noted that “the people who actually have to do this don’t call it ‘grit,’ they call it ‘life.’”  Hansen said that focusing on intangible skills is an important way of recognizing the value of schools in shaping their students. Although also skeptical of current policy initiatives to implement such qualities, he believed that the concept does warrant further study.

“The people who actually have to do this don’t call it ‘grit,’ they call it ‘life.’”

Missed our education disparities event on June 8, 2016 or want to learn more? See the Bringing education disparities to the forefront of the political debate event page for a full video recap .

Also see the post-event Facebook Live conversation with Alia Wong and DeRay Mckesson.

Thank you to Grant Michl for contributing to this post.

Governance Studies

Brown Center on Education Policy

Kenneth K. Wong

July 15, 2024

Jack Malamud, Cameron F. Kerry, Mark MacCarthy, Katharine Meyer, Tom Wheeler

July 10, 2024

Sofoklis Goulas

June 27, 2024

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Unsure who to vote for in the Maricopa County recorder's race? Hear from the candidates

The upcoming state primary will winnow down the field in the pivotal race for Maricopa County recorder.

The seat holds power over voter registration and early voting, and the race has drawn national attention. Maricopa County is the most populous county in the state and one of the largest voting jurisdictions in the country. Recently, it has also become a breeding ground for voting conspiracies.

Three Republicans are running for a shot at the key position: Incumbent Stephen Richer, information technology professional Don Hiatt and state Rep. Justin Heap. Whoever wins will face military veteran and attorney Timothy Stringham, a Democrat, in the November election.

Richer, first elected in 2020, is looking for a second term in office. During his time in office, he touts his efforts to clean voter rolls and improve chain of custody documentation. Along the way, he's established himself as a staunch defender of the county's elections and has pushed back on voting conspiracies and misinformation.

Arizona election: Read our full coverage of county races

Heap and Hiatt both have voiced issues with county elections . Heap, who has previously supported legislation to remove Arizona from a multistate voter registration list maintenance effort, has pledged to clean voter rolls. He also has promised faster election results. Hiatt also commits to cleaning voter rolls and says he would publicly release election-related data, including detailed logs from machines that tally votes.

The Arizona Republic asked each candidate questions about their bid for office and how they would handle key issues if elected. Here's what they had to say. Answers may have been slightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Growth: How will you ensure election processes can withstand population increases?

If elected, you will be tasked with overseeing voter registration and early voting in a rapidly growing county. What steps will you take to ensure voter rolls are properly maintained? What changes or improvements would you make to early ballot processing and signature verification?

Stephen Richer: When I took office in January 2021, Maricopa County had 2.6 million active registered voters. We now have 2.4 million active registered voters. That's a decrease of 200,000 voters despite being the fastest-growing county in the United States. I don't have to talk about what I would do to improve our voter rolls. I've done it. And I've done it in a lawful manner. Many people talk about what they would do — for example, that they would use data provided by a real estate brokerage — in a way that shows their ignorance of the law. And my office always follows the law. As for how we did it, I prioritized voter list maintenance by allocating personnel to the department and recruiting an incredibly knowledgeable and talented director of voter registration. 

We rebuilt the voter registration database, we used new list maintenance tools and we conducted the largest-ever public information campaign. We now use every single lawful list maintenance tool at our disposal, including Arizona Department of Vital Statistics reports, Social Security Administration data, U.S. Postal Service national change of address reports, Electronic Registration Information Center interstate mover reports, Arizona obituaries, juror reports and more.

Don Hiatt: My lifetime of working with data integrity gives me the skills necessary to apply accepted industry methodologies to maintain the voter list of data. I would work with the Board of Supervisors to push for ending "voting month." When a person comes to a precinct location to vote, they would present their valid government identification, thus reducing the need for the signature verification step that currently requires days and days to complete. The county will save money, increase security and have results published the next day. What is so hard to understand about simple precinct voting with friendly hand counts in the evening?

Justin Heap: Effective voter roll management is central to ensuring voters can have trust in the process of Maricopa County’s elections. Under the current recorder, voter roll maintenance has been laughable at best, resulting in historically low voter confidence and voter disenfranchisement. My promise to voters is to do everything within the confines of our election laws to clean our voter rolls in real time and to restore transparency, lawfulness and honesty back to our elections. In the Arizona Legislature, I am fighting for this, and I will make it happen as recorder.

Timothy Stringham: Arizona already has a robust process to protect our voter rolls while making our elections accessible for voters. What I promise to do is to listen intently to our poll workers and our career election officials, and work to bring them resources and advocate for policies to make their jobs easier. In Maricopa County, we have over 2.4 million voters and we record over a million documents a year. The job of the recorder is to make sure our employees have the tools to get a job of that size done. Leadership should always listen to their workers before deciding that they know better. That's what I've done as an officer in the United States military and it's how I'll lead as the county recorder.

Threats: How will you protect your workers from harassment?

County election officials have seen threats and harassment in recent years. What steps would you take to protect your staff, ensure your office can retain employees and ensure you can attract new workers when needed?

Richer: I'm proud of my ability to recruit and retain the best staff. People stay because they know I have their backs. I don't mince words in responding to crazy accusations. I stand up to threats. And I work alongside them. I am in the office 60 hours per week. I work even the most menial tasks, because I care about them and I care about the mission. We have also done more concrete things such as constructing a new exterior fence, increasing the number of security cameras, arranging for security personnel during election times, conducting safety training, fortifying certain windows, installing metal detectors, enhancing cyber security and more. 

We also work very closely with our law enforcement partners, all of whom have been absolutely wonderful, especially the Sheriff's Office. I'd led operations and businesses before taking office. My primary opponents have not. It's a laughable thought that somebody who has never made a hiring decision, a firing decision or managed a significantly-sized team should come in and run this office of 150 full-time employees.

Hiatt: Once we return to precinct voting, the public will gain confidence in the election process, and harassment will end. Violent protestors should always be arrested.

Heap: I condemn any and all violence or threats against all election officials. That is simply not who we are as Americans. I categorically reject it. I also condemn the Democrats weaponization of our government and justice system to target and destroy their political opponents. Both of these are a perverse corruption of our American institutions. If anyone makes a credible threat against a public official, I believe they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Stringham: The county recorder needs to work closely with all of our law enforcement agencies in the Valley as well as federal agencies to analyze every aspect of our security, whether that means Election Day security, election integrity or office safety. I've worked in national security for more than 15 years, including time working for the Department of Justice, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. I also have a master's degree in national security law from Georgetown University, so safety for our employees and our voters isn't just a top priority for me, it's an area of expertise.

Electoral trust: How confident are you in election results?

How confident are you in the certified results of the 2020 and 2022 elections?

Richer: Very, very confident. See all the post-election assessments. See the court cases. If you're running for recorder and can't give a plain answer to this question, then you either haven't done your homework or you're a coward. Either is disqualifying.

Hiatt: The 2020 election was stolen through a myriad of steps. Poll workers used to be able to observe if someone "stuffed" extra ballots in the ballot box. Today, the ballot box is being stuffed with green, no excuse mail-in ballots. If we want to save our state and the nation, we must end our love affair with the green, no-excuse mail-in ballot and return to precinct voting with paper ballots, valid photo identification and a friendly hand count during the evening, giving results by midnight. Did you know France, Mexico, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, Ukraine, Russia, Japan and no Middle Eastern or Latin countries allow mail-in voting, primarily to avoid fraud? Maybe the U.S. should wake up and smell the coffee and ban no excuse mail-in ballots.

Heap: What’s abundantly clear to any honest observer is that voters are disenfranchised and have lost trust in our elections. Restoring voter confidence and the integrity of our elections has become the civil rights issue of our time. We need more transparency, lawfulness and honesty in the election process so every voter is confident in the outcomes of Maricopa County elections.

Stringham: I'm extremely confident in the results of those elections, however, I also don't want anyone to feel like their concerns are being dismissed nor do I think we need to be complacent about future elections. It is fantastic that people are interested in election security and integrity. We just want to make sure that we are having informed, honest discussions, instead of what we got with the Cyber Ninjas investigation , which was a grossly irresponsible waste of taxpayer money. 

Property documents: How would you improve recording functions?

The recorder does more than just election-related duties. If elected, you will also be responsible for recording a variety of documents, including deeds, plats and other property records. How would you improve the current recording system and searchable database?

Richer: None of my opponents have any experience in election administration, voter registration administration or recording public documents. That's a problem. One has never even recorded a property document, because he lives in his parent's house. That's something we record thousands of times per day. My team and I are very nearly done with the completion of a redesign of the recording website. The new website will allow users to more easily find specific recorded documents, digitally record documents and browse our index of over 55 million recorded documents. 

This is very important because over 90% of our customers now digitally record. In addition to the new website, in the last year, we built Maricopa Title Alert to prevent deed fraud. We already have over 65,000 individual subscribers. Also in the past year, we launched remote recording kiosks, and we've indexed over two million historic documents that were previously unavailable for searches by name. In 2025, I hope to use technology to automatically read recorded documents such that users can search recorded documents by additional fields. I will continue working to prevent deed fraud. I suspect that is why I have been endorsed by the major real estate associations.

Hiatt: I want to improve the security around property deeds and notify individuals when changes occur to their records. I will also analyze the processes currently in use and make appropriate improvements that will increase security.

Heap: I will make sure the system is accessible and transparent for everyone. We need to be constantly vigilant in protecting Maricopa County property owners against deed and title fraud by enhancing the notification systems for property owners whenever a change in status occurs.

Stringham: Deed fraud is increasingly becoming a problem and we need to work closely with our real estate professionals and title companies to create secure processes to record documents, as well as efficient processes to identify and investigate suspected fraud that do not slow down business in a fast-growing county. This issue might not affect a lot of people, but when it does, the results are catastrophic. We also need to continue to work to improve our county websites so that if you do need information, it is readily accessible.

On a personal note: Who do you admire?

What person in public life, past or present, do you most admire, and why?

Richer: My ideological north star growing up was Milton Friedman, and he's part of the reason why I chose to go to the University of Chicago for law school and graduate school. My favorite president is George Washington. Walking away from power was so unique in the course of human history. We easily could have become just another monarchy.

I moved to Arizona during Doug Ducey's governorship, and I immediately took pride in his leadership — hardworking, professional, moral, principled and prudent. I admire anyone in public life who says hard truths. Most recently, this made me admire former Scottsdale City Councilwoman Linda Milhaven, who stood up in front of a sizable audience and defended the dignity of a public employee, even though she knew it would not be well-received by the audience.

Similarly, former Gov. Jan Brewer recently wrote in The Arizona Republic about a hard truth. My appreciation and respect for her continues to grow. If more public actors had the courage these two recently exhibited, we'd be in a better position as a society. And I continue to admire my friend, supporter and mentor Helen Purcell, who held this office for 28 years.

Hiatt: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the first president I remember in my young life because I know the exact spot I was standing when I heard he had been assassinated. He left a lasting impression on my life. As he said: "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country." He also inspired me with the goal of placing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. 

Justin Heap: President Abraham Lincoln. Not only is he the father of the Republican Party, but he successfully fought the signature civil rights battle in our nation’s history. His steadfastness, faith and wisdom held America together during its darkest time. Election integrity has become the civil rights issue of my lifetime. I am running for Maricopa County recorder to make sure that every voter, regardless of political party, can have trust that our elections are run honestly, securely and accessibly.

Timothy Stringham: My fellow U.S. Navy veteran, John McCain, who reminded us that there was no greater life than one spent in service.