Making classrooms more inclusive reduces the achievement gap in STEM: evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial

Students from marginalized groups tend to achieve lower grades in STEM college courses than their non-marginalized peers. We tested the effectiveness of two interventions, one aimed at changing the environment and the other aimed at changing the students. The “Inclusion intervention” helped instructors create a cooperative classroom environment where students felt interconnected and pro-inclusion social expectations were made explicit.

The “Resilience intervention” consisted of well-established strategies that focus on changing the cognitions and attributions of students from marginalized groups. We compared the two interventions against a no-exposure control group in a large-scale cluster-randomized controlled trial involving 60 STEM courses (NStudents = 2,116). Results show that in courses assigned to the Inclusion intervention, students from marginalized racial/ethnic groups obtained better grades – more than half a letter grade – than those in the control condition, whereas the Resilience intervention had little beneficial effect.

Our research demonstrates the importance of making the classroom environment more inclusive. We thank the instructors who participated in this study and the university registrars who facilitated data collection. We also thank the members of the Wisconsin Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (Wisconsin LSAMP) for their support of this study.

We are especially grateful to the many research assistants in our lab for their assistance. Jordan Schwakopf, the research specialist employed through the grant awarded to WiscAMP, was crucial in the intial phases of this research. National Science Foundation grant 1911284.

Present address: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA Present address: Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA Kevin R. Means & Markus Brauer Institute for Diversity Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA The authors declare no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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