Race, Class, and Gender in Education Research: An Argument for Integrative Analysis

Race, social class, and gender tend to be treated as separate issues in education literature. We review a sample of education literature from four journals, spanning ten years, to determine the extent to which these status groups were integrated. We found little integration. We then provide an example from research on cooperative learning to illustrate how attention to only one status group oversimplifies the analysis of student behavior in school. From findings of studies integrating race and class, and race and gender, we argue that attending only to race, in this example, oversimplifies behavior analysis and may contribute to perpetuation of gender and class biases.