Inclusive Classrooms Can Help Close the STEM Achievement Gap, Study Finds

A student can be capable, work hard and still find it harder to succeed in a classroom where they do not feel that they belong. The question that schools and colleges don't really ask is how much does the learning environment itself influence student performance? This is what a new study in Scientific Reports asks.

In a large randomized controlled trial of STEM courses at public universities in the Midwestern United States, researchers Kevin R. Kennedy, Kira K. Means and Markus Brauer put this idea to the test. The research was conducted during the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 semesters, and the paper was accepted by Scientific Reports on September 4, 2026. 

The researchers looked at students from marginalized racial and ethnic groups, including African American, Native American/American Indian, Latinx/Hispanic and students identifying as two or more races. The students in their study consisted of 2,116 students from grade data, but after some exclusions for various reasons, the final analysis was 1,737 students.

Two ways of trying to solve the same problem

The courses were randomly placed into one of three groups: a control group, a Resilience intervention or an Inclusion intervention. 

1. In this group, teachers taught as they normally did.
2. The Resilience approach was used for the second group of students: Practices were provided for teachers to help students make connections between lessons and their lives, use feedback to learn, and learn to be confident in school and that intelligence can be practiced. Students were also challenged to think of academic problems as challenges, not threats, and of values that were important to them.
3. The Inclusion approach was for the third group: Rather than primarily expecting students to adjust to challenging situations, it sought to modify the classroom environment for the teachers. The six practices encompassed encouraging interaction between students from diverse backgrounds, fostering a more cooperative learning atmosphere, developing a deeper connection between teachers and students, establishing an explicit classroom culture of inclusion, increasing students' sense of belonging, and cultivating positive beliefs about social groups.

That difference is obvious and the most interesting aspect of the research. One strategy is basically, "make the student feel better. The other question is: Can we improve the place where the student learns?

The classroom had a measurable impact

The outcomes were different for the two interventions. The average course grade for the marginalized students in the control group was 2.71 out of 4.0. It was 2.87 in the Resilience group. This difference was not statistically significant, however.

The average grade for the Inclusion group, however, was 3.34. That was a 0.627 grade point higher than the control group, which was more than half a letter grade on the study's 4-point scale. This finding was not changed by the use of other analyses that took into account the clustering of students within classrooms.

This impact did not just happen to marginalized students. Overall, the average grade was 2.95 in the control courses, 2.85 in the Resilience courses and 3.27 in the Inclusion courses. There was a statistically significant difference between the achievement gap of marginalized and non-marginalized students in the control condition. No significant difference was detected between intervention conditions.

The study does not imply that the solution to educational inequality is a single friendly teacher. Its finding is narrower and more useful: making some changes in the classroom environment was linked to significant improvements in grades, especially for the students who were at the margins.

Why this matters for teachers

Sometimes the word "inclusion" may sound like a fuzzy concept that isn't relevant to classroom practice. The practices in this study bring it to a more tangible level.

A classroom can provide opportunities for students to get to know each other instead of keeping them apart in social groups. It can increase cooperation over unnecessary competition. A teacher can gain some insight into the individual student rather than just the grade. Inclusion can also be seen as a normal expectation, not just a message that is occasionally sent.

These are little tweaks in the way a classroom operates, but the findings from the researchers suggest that the impact of all of them can be much bigger than the size of the individual activities might suggest.

There's a lesson in this too about how we talk about struggling students. If a student is not performing well, one's first thoughts are to consider their motivation, confidence, study habits or resilience. Those things matter. However, the study indicates that a focus on the student alone can be incomplete.

The question is not always “How can we make this student stronger? It can also be, “What type of classroom is this student being asked to succeed in?”

The researchers are careful about what the study proves

The findings have limits. The Inclusion intervention contained six connected teaching practices, so the researchers cannot say which individual practice produced the improvement. They also could not identify the exact psychological mechanism behind the higher grades.

The other limitation is significant: the setting. The study was carried out at four public universities, and the final sample was about 85% White. The researchers, therefore, warn that the results might not be applicable in precisely the same manner in colleges with distinct student populations. They also note that differences in how instructors implemented the practices could have affected the results.

What does this study tell us

To understand the study in simplest words, we can say that you can tell a plant to “Try harder. Grow stronger.” But the plant also needs good soil, water and sunlight. Students are a little like that. Helping them become confident is useful, but the place where they learn matters too.

This research suggests that teachers may be able to help students perform better not only by teaching the student how to cope with problems, but also by making the classroom a place where students feel included, supported and able to work with others. The researchers are careful, though. They do not say that every inclusive classroom will automatically produce better grades. Their study was done at U.S. universities, and they could not tell which one of the six inclusion practices caused the improvement. 

So, the simplest lesson from the research is: Don't only ask, “How can we make students better learners?” Sometimes we should also ask, “How can we make the classroom better for learning?”

Research: Kennedy, K.R., Means, K.K. & Brauer, M. Making classrooms more inclusive reduces the achievement gap in STEM: evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-70718-9