Project Implicit Race IAT

In January, the researcher began her student teaching with the intention of finding out how reading and discussing equality-related literature influences students’ attitudes toward race. She planned to have her students read a few texts with race as a central theme, and she would study their change or stagnation in attitude toward race over the semester through a triangulation process. Her data collection would begin and end with Harvard’s Project Implicit Race IAT, found at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html, and a survey on attitudes toward race, which can be accessed in the appendix. During the research, she would use journal entries to assess her students’ attitudes for change or no change. In total, the research …show more content…
At the beginning her inquiry, the researcher’s students wrote journal entries of varying lengths, which gave students who wrote the most the opportunity for a much higher or lower score than their classmates who only wrote a few sentences. The researcher set a minimum of three sentences to combat this issue, which also caused students who wrote longer responses to shorten them. Unfortunately, a few students still wrote extremely short responses. The long and extremely short journal responses at the beginning of the research and the equipoised responses at the end likely account for the severe statistical significance of the research. The researcher also spread out her assignment of entries during the first half of the inquiry then gave them more frequently toward the end. The uneven distribution could also cause in an imbalance in the results, as could the fact that the students were usually rushed through their responses because the journal entries were only a warm up activity for the period and not the lesson itself. Students were also hurried through the Race IAT for similar reasons. The researcher thinks students may have given more thoughtful or longer answers if they had not been so …show more content…
The researcher lacks consistent research on every student because of absences and work not turned in. Additionally, some students could not finish the Race IAT before the end of the period. As a result, the researcher dealt with missing journal entries, surveys, and Race IAT results. Besides attrition, the researcher experienced the threat of differential selection; she could not use random selection when choosing her research participants. Instead, the researcher could work with one section of English Twelve in one school in one county of Virginia. This means she can only extend her results to these students. The researcher thinks students might have given more candid answers on the survey and in their journal entries if they had known her longer. As it stands, students only knew the researcher for a semester before they began participating in her inquiry; during the semester they got to know her, she only visited the classroom once a