Teachers' explicit expectations and implicit prejudiced attitudes to educational achievement: Relations with student achievement and the ethnic achievement gap
By Elizabeth R. Peterson, Christine Rubie-Davies, Danny Osborne, Chris G. Sibley. 2016
263 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract In this paper, we consider whether teachers' explicit and implicit prejudiced attitudes underlie the ethnic achievement gap. To date, most research on teacher expectation effects has relied on explicit expectation measures that are prone to social desirability biases. In contrast, we examine the effects of teachers' (a) explicit ethnicity-based expectations for academic achievement and (b) implicit prejudiced attitudes about academic achievement on students' actual academic success over time. A total of 38 teachers completed both a traditional teacher expectation measure and a modified Implicit Association Task designed to assess ethnic stereotypes associated with academic achievement and failure. A multi-level analytic framework showed that students in classrooms of teachers with high expectations performed better in reading at the end of the year and that these effects were found across all ethnic groups. In contrast, whereas students' mathematics achievement scores were largely unrelated to teachers' explicit expectations, teachers' implicit prejudiced attitudes predicted student performance. Specifically, students benefited most academically when their teachers' implicit biases favored the ethnic group to which the student belonged. Findings are discussed in relation to differences in the salience of teachers' expectations and implicit prejudiced attitude in the classroom, and the ethnic achievement gap.
Subfields: Education, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/398e00c066618ef4197557fa161d3f491327a3ea
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Citations in the corpus
- Bias in the Air: A Nationwide Exploration of Teachers’ Implicit Racial Attitudes, Aggregate Bias, and Student Outcomes (2020, background): “…have shown that teachers’ levels of implicit bias (as measured by the IAT) toward racial/ethnic minorities is associated with test score inequalities within teachers’ classrooms (Peterson et al., 2016; van den Bergh et al., 2010), and similar results have been found for gender bias (Carlana, 2019).”