Teachers’ Beliefs about Anger Affect How They Judge and Discipline Student Behavior

• In Event: Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Topic - Education, Schooling

Abstract

Teachers influence the academic success and interpersonal relationships with and between their students. The beliefs that teachers bring to the classroom have the potential to shape and guide their behaviors and interactions with their students, including their disciplinary decisions. Further, disciplinary actions have been increasing substantially in the last few decades. To explore how teachers’ beliefs about emotions shape their interpretation and then guide their behaviors in the classroom, we assessed the teachers’ beliefs about students’ anger and how those beliefs might specifically influence how teachers interpret and discipline those around them.
We recruited 228 elementary, middle-school, and high-school teachers in five school districts in North Carolina by writing to their publicly available emails. Teachers’ completed a 30-item questionnaire about their general beliefs about the harm and value of student-expressed anger in the classroom and judged two videotaped vignettes of misbehaving boys in a school setting (e.g., dropping another student’s artwork in the garbage while looking right at the student; picking up another student’s cell phone, shaking his head, and walking away with it) and in which the student actor displayed anger towards the teacher (e.g., saying “this is stupid” when not understanding a math problem, and getting up and leaving a math tutoring session; telling the teacher she gave him the wrong test and then when second request not met, balling up and throwing the paper away). Embedded in the series of questions about the events were the items on perception of aggression (e.g., “how aggressive was this behavior?”) and disciplinary decisions (e.g., “how severely would you discipline this child?”). All teachers saw the same vignettes.
We predicted that two types of teachers’ beliefs would guide how they interpreted the students’ actions, and these interpretations would then mediate their discipline decisions. First, teachers’ beliefs that their students’ anger was harmful was associated with their intention of disciplining the child more severely (r = 0.21, p < .05 ), while teachers’ belief that anger was useful was associated with disciplining the student actor less severely (r = -0.16, p < .05 ). We therefore moved onto mediation. Teachers’ perception of aggression of the student actors (β = .47, p < .001) mediated the association between the belief that anger is harmful and intention to discipline, β = .14, p = .02. Further, teachers’ perception of aggression (β = .48, p < .001) fully mediated the association between the belief that anger is useful and disciplinary intention, β = -.03, p = .68. Grade level did not influence these patterns. These results suggest that teachers’ general beliefs about harm and value of student anger may affect what they perceive in the classroom and how they then act on those perceptions. To reduce unnecessary disciplinary actions in school, we may want to explore teachers’ feelings about students’ feelings.

Authors

• Courtney Hagan, North Carolina State University
  Presenting Author

• Amy Halberstadt, North Carolina State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kamilah Legette, University of Denver
  Non-Presenting Author