And once you know what’s happening, the next step is what I call discretion elimination. This can be applied when people are making decisions that involve subjective judgment about a person. This could be police officers, employers making hiring or promotion decisions, doctors deciding on a patient’s treatment, or teachers making decisions about students’ performance. When those decisions are made with discretion, they are likely to result in unintended disparities. But when those decisions are made based on predetermined, objective criteria that are rigorously applied, they are much less likely to produce disparities.

For diversity and inclusion training to stick, it needs support, reinforcement and a firm foundation in a broader talent management strategy that includes culture, leadership and learning and development.

Ask these questions: Does our culture embrace diversity and inclusion? Do our leaders understand their value to the business and the workforce? Do the organization’s talent management strategies and systems support and enable diversity and inclusion? If not, training would be precipitous because the right support for this type of development is not there.

“Telling people they’re racist, sexist, and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere,” said Alana Conner, executive director of Stanford University’s Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions Center. “It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.”

In <a href="https://perception.org/publications/science-of-equality-vol-1/"><em>The Science of Equality</em></a>, Godsil and her co-authors proposed several tactics that seem, based on the research, promising: presenting people with examples that break stereotypes, asking them to think about people of color as individuals rather than as a group, tasking them with taking on first-person perspectives of people of color, and increasing contact between people of different races. All of these interventions appear to reduce subconscious racial biases, while interracial contact appears most promising for reducing racial anxiety more broadly.

Godsil and her team also put forward tactics that can help people limit actions based on racial biases, such as getting people to slow down in their decision-making and teaching them about how subconscious processes can influence their impulses — even on issues unrelated to race — in order to push them to question their own objectivity. The research suggests these ideas have potential, but they generally seem to require that people are genuinely willing to reduce their biased behavior and actions.

Tinkering with the spreadsheets seems to be a reasonable approach to working with a new problem, in line with generating and testing alternative strategies to find a solution. In other words, learning.&nbsp; Women who tinkered with the spreadsheets seemed to be doing just that, and, for them, tinkering predicted more effective problem solving. &nbsp;Counter-intuitively, though, when men tinkered with the spreadsheet, they were <i>less</i> effective in correcting the errors.&nbsp; The opposite results seem attributable to the fact that women paused before trying something else, long enough to process the information.

In the final experiment, researchers provided a different kind of tutorial — one that emphasized a strategic, rather than a feature-by-feature approach to the problem.

Women who participated in this condition were almost as likely to use the new features as the men in the same study, and were able to solve more problems more quickly than women who didn’t use the new features.&nbsp; Men in this condition were not significantly helped or hindered, which means that it’s possible to prevent a bias against women without introducing a bias against men.

If an electrician was too afraid of electricity to touch a wire, he'd be an electrician no more. So if an educator is afraid of the information and communication technologies of his/her age, then he/she can no longer be an "educator" in any meaningful way.

Utilize decision-making scenarios. Consider using them not just in a minor role—for example at the end of a section—but integrated into the main narrative of your learning design.

Determine the most important points you want to get across AND the most important situations in which these points are critical. Then, provide extra repetitions spaced over time on these key points and situations.

McClaren, who looks back on what happened from his new post several states away, says he made "two fatal assumptions" when he started: "I thought if it was good for kids, everyone would embrace it, and I thought all adults wanted all kids to be successful. That's not true. The people who receive status from their kids' performing well in school didn't like that other kids' performance might be raised to the level of their own kids'."

These models suggest that any move away from the SAT or ACT in competitive colleges results in significant gains in ethnic and economic diversity. But the gains are greater for colleges that drop testing entirely, as opposed to just making it optional.

The findings appear to confirm what SAT critics have said for years: that reliance on the SAT in college admissions favors applicants who are white and/or wealthier than other applicants.