Hidden Biases of “Good Nonimmigrant Teachers”: Implicit Attitudes, Explicit Expectations, and the Ethnic Achievement Gap—A Mixed-Methods Study

• In Event: Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Beliefs and Minority Youth

Abstract

This paper reports results of a study in the framework of a large-scale research project to evaluate the Austrian school reform, the “New Middle School”. The overall goal of the reform is to limit marginalizing processes and to improve transitions and trajectories within an inclusive school setting. The paper asks how non-immigrant teachers implicitly think about their immigrant students, how these attitudes are reflected in explicit teacher expectancies, and how are expectancies related to students’ achievements? A preliminary analysis shows that immigrant students’ achievements are consistently and significantly lower than their non-immigrant peers, that an overriding majority of teachers hold negative implicit attitudes towards ethnic minority students, and that teachers’ expectancies of students’ achievement depend on student’s ethnic origin.

Authors

• Neda Forghani-Arani, University of Vienna

• Corinna Geppert, University of Vienna

• Tamara Katschnig, University of Vienna