Nicole Lorenzetti explores the relationship between implicit racial attitudes and labeling of classroom behavior

Published in ConnectED Newsletter - Volume 6 - Issue 3 - March 2023

Nicole Lorenzetti, a Doctoral Lecturer in Educational Foundations and Special Education, recently published an article entitled “The relationship between teachers’ implicit racial attitudes and their labeling of classroom behavior” in the journal Critical Questions in Education. Co-authored with Helen Johnson (CUNY Graduate Center), the study was grounded in attribution theory, which humans use to make sense of others’ behavior. It examined whether there was a correlation between the racial bias section of the Implicit Associations Test (IAT) and differences in attributions of Black and White teacher education students to explain challenging behaviors in the classroom.

Professor Lorenzetti has always been interested in what drives human behavior and motivations for actions. She says that, “as an educational psychologist, I care deeply about teacher behavior toward students in a formal classroom setting, and how that may be impacted by beliefs about and attitudes toward students. The more research I did around implicit bias, the more I realized that racial bias drives a lot of human interpersonal behavior, so it made sense to use this as a jumping off point for examining teacher beliefs about students.” The study was a pilot study for a much larger study around racial implicit bias, teacher beliefs, and decision-making around student classroom behavior.

This line of research has shifted what Professor Lorenzetti does in the teacher education classroom. As she wrote in the article’s conclusion, teacher education programs are the hinge between teachers’ own educational experience as students and their future work as teachers. She explains that “no one is a blank slate when they make that transition, meaning that all our previously learned knowledge informs what we learn about teaching and about understanding students in teacher education. Examining what we believe about our students in the classroom is crucial to honoring our students’ humanity and knowledge they bring into the classroom, at all ages.”