Using an anti-racist, equity-minded lens in assessment of teaching and learning

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent materials from the U.S. Council on Social Work Education note that regardless of some successes, racial equity in higher education has not significantly progressed. Recent scholarship has noted racial discrimination in social work academia. However, we were not able to find any publications about racial disproportionality in social work education grading or educational attainment. In this article, we document an intentional anti-racist, equity-minded practice in considering academic outcomes by race and ethnicity in individual professors’ students over a two-year period. We detail simple analyses educators can use to examine assessment practices—the use of population percentage comparisons/disproportionality analysis to assess for the potential presence of disproportionality. These analyses are intended as a simple starting point for considerations of what is going on pedagogically in the classroom and the mind and actions of the professor as an equity-minded, anti-racist practitioner. We model the use and consideration of assessment data with examples from our own teaching. We found our empirical inquiry focused on racial equity to be instructive in both process and outcome considerations. We consider the ways in which our findings may or may not be related to implicit bias and/or structural racism in the social work education setting.