Racial and gender achievement gaps in an economics classroom

In this paper, we document gender and race/ethnic achievement gaps over four semesters of an intermediate-level economics course. We find that, on average, under-represented minority (URM) students score lower on assessments, and this racial achievement gap differs in important ways for male and female students. Male URM students earned lower final exam scores than male non-URM students, but this gap disappears when we control for differences in prior preparation. In contrast, female URM students performed significantly worse than female non-URM students, even after controlling for prior preparation. We also analyze scores on low-stakes assessments and surveys about study behavior and find that the theory of stereotype threat most consistently explains our results. As these issues are unlikely to be unique to our classroom, we offer several potential pedagogical approaches found in the literature to address the differences in prior preparation and stereotype threat that underlie observed achievement gaps.