Effects of Teachers’ Bias on Students’ Post-Secondary Education Choices

This senior capstone research project focuses on how teachers’ bias can affect a student’s post-secondary education choices. Grounded on years of personal experience observing teachers' favoritism toward certain students, this study will seek to determine if teacher bias affects students. Through the use of literature review, interviews with 5 teachers, and surveys with 19 college and graduate students, the result findings indicated that teachers’ implicit bias has the biggest impact on students’ future education choices. It is important to note that teachers have a lot of influence on their students’ long-lasting future education as well as their career choices. Another note to take into consideration is that teacher bias can be reduced to better benefit students through building relationships with students, practicing the four equity levers, and teachers being conduits to each other; these are a few strategies to reduce teacher bias. Not only by using these strategies, along with the responsibility of being fair and equal with all students, teachers can sway students to feel confident to follow their choices. Given this, teachers should be conscious of their bias and work towards having a better understanding of their diverse student populations.