A brief report on the promise of system 2 cues for impacting teacher decision-making in school discipline practices for Black male youth.

Despite the evidence implicating implicit racial bias in teacher decision-making as one reason for the overrepresentation of Black male students in school discipline practices, there is minimal research regarding interventions that address implicit racial bias in the school setting. A System 2 cue refers to a behavioral cue that engages more deliberate and controlled cognitive processes in decision-making and mitigates the impact of unconscious racial bias in decision-making, in contrast to System 1 processing which employs more automatic cognitive processes. This pilot study evaluated the use of a System 2 cue in teacher decision-making and included 361 practicing teachers. All participants read a vignette describing a Black male student’s behavior and were then assigned to a control condition or the System 2 cue condition. Differences in teacher perception of troublesome behavior were analyzed with independent samples t test and likelihood of completing an office discipline referral was compared with binary logistic regression. Results indicate that addition of a System 2 cue predicted ODR likelihood, but perception of troublesome behavior was more predictive and explained the relationship between System 2 cue and referral likelihood. Further, we found differences in two aspects of troublesome behavior perception (i.e., level of concern and belief that the behavior will occur again in the future) for teachers receiving a System 2 cue compared to those who did not, preliminarily suggesting that some perceptions of troublesome behavior may be alterable through System 2 cues. Impact and Implications Statement—Results of this study indicate that cuing more deliberate decision-making processes in a student behavioral referral process rendered teachers less likely to perceive the behaviors of a Black student in a vignette as troublesome. Teachers who were less likely to perceive student behavior as troublesome were also less likely to complete an office discipline referral. These results indicate that cues prompting teachers to be more deliberate about decision-making may impact teachers’ perceptions of student behavior and ultimately result in fewer discipline referrals for Black boys in schools. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)