Context-based discrimination in education outcomes: Examining the effects of ethnic classroom composition on teachers’ use of disciplinary measures in school
Final Report Abstract
Previous research suggests disparities in the ways teachers respond to students from racialized groups. For example, teachers are more likely to intervene following disruptive behavior by students perceived as Black in the US or by students perceived as Turkish or Arab in Germany. Such disparities are often explained by teachers ascribing negative stereotypes to their students. The goal of the project was to examine to what extent context-based factors also moderate teachers’ cognition and behavior, contributing to disparities in educational outcomes. Introducing a new perspective, a key assumption of the project was that teachers' reactions to students are not only shaped by individual-level stereotyping, but also by immediate contextual factors such as the classroom composition. More specifically, we used a novel experimental design to examine causal effects of the immediate classroom context (i.e., the perceived ethnic composition) on teachers’ experiences (e.g., stereotypes; emotions) and behavioral intentions. To provide initial evidence and validate the experimental method, the projects’ main findings relied on a large sample of preservice teachers, who participated in an online experiment. We hypothesized that, when confronted with descriptions of misbehaviors in the classroom, preservice teachers would be willing to use more severe disciplinary measures in classrooms with larger proportions of students perceived as Arab. The projects’ findings were consistent with this hypothesis. Preservice teachers who were presented with disruptive behaviors in a classroom context with students perceived as Arab reported feeling more irritated by the students’ disruptive behaviors than those in a classroom context with students perceived as German. Participants were also more likely to suggest more severe forms of discipline in response to disruptive behaviors in classrooms with many students perceived as Arab (vs. German). Importantly, preservice teachers also perceived the entire classroom context as more challenging and more negatively when the class was composed of a larger proportion of students perceived as Arab. Together, the project provides support for the idea of context-based discrimination, suggesting that structural factors of the immediate context such as the composition of the student body may be consequential for social cognition and decision-making in the classroom. Because these structural factors operate at contextual levels, they likely affect many students at a time, underscoring their relevance as well as the need for future research that considers context-based discrimination and its relationship with group disparities in educational outcomes.
Publications
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Context-based discrimination in school discipline. Paper presented at the EASP-SPSSI Small Group Meeting, Society in the Classroom: Integrating Perspectives on How Socioeconomic Disparities Unfold in Educational Settings, London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom.
Essien, I.
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Context-based discrimination in school. Position paper presented at the 52nd Congress of the German Psychological Society (DGPs), Hildesheim, Germany.
Essien, I., Froehlich, L., Siem, B. & Rohmann, A.
