The Implicit Association Test in health professions education: A meta-narrative review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Implicit bias is a growing area of interest among educators. Educational strategies used to elicit awareness of implicit biases commonly include the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Although the topic of implicit bias is gaining increased attention, emerging critique of the IAT suggests the need to subject its use to greater theoretical and empirical scrutiny. METHODS: The authors employed a meta-narrative synthesis to review existing research on the use of the IAT in health professions education. Four databases were searched using key terms yielding 1151 titles. After title, abstract and full-text screening, 38 articles were chosen for inclusion. Coding and analysis of articles sought a meaningful synthesis of educational approaches relating to the IAT, and the assumptions and theoretical positions that informed these approaches. RESULTS: Distinct, yet complementary, meta-narratives were found in the literature. The dominant perspective utilizes the IAT as a metric of implicit bias to evaluate the success of an educational activity. A contrasting narrative describes the IAT as a tool to promote awareness while triggering discussion and reflection. DISCUSSION: Whether used as a tool to measure bias, raise awareness or trigger reflection, the use of the IAT provokes tension between distinct meta-narratives, posing a challenge to educators. Curriculum designers should consider the premise behind the IAT before using it, and be prepared to address potential reactions from learners such as defensiveness or criticism. Overall, findings suggest that educational approaches regarding implicit bias require critical reflexivity regarding assumptions, values and theoretical positioning related to the IAT.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".