Teacher Attunement and Cognitive Biases in Teachers’ Perception of Bullying, Victimization and Prosociality

• In Event: 3-247 - The Social Peer Ecology in Classrooms: The Role of Students, Teachers and School-Based Interventions

Integrative Statement

In order to foster positive relationships while preventing bullying, victimization and additional behavioral problems, teachers need to be aware of the social dynamics in the classroom (Farmer et al., 2011). Teachers' ability to recognize a wide range of students' social dynamics and roles has been referred to as teacher attunement (Ahn & Rodkin, 2014). Previous studies reported that more attuned teacher were better at promoting social integration and peer acceptance, improving students' sense of school belonging, and setting anti-aggression norms. However, teachers seemed to be unaware of aggressive acts in their classroom and often did not perceive students who reported to be victimized as victims.

This study examined to what extent primary school teachers were attuned to their students and the factors that could hindered teachers' understanding of students' social characteristics, specifically: bullying, victimization and prosociality. First, for each of these three dimensions, the overlap between teachers and peers nominations was examined. Second, it was investigated whether teachers’ perceptions of students’ academic, social, and behavioral characteristics were associated with their attunement to peer nominated bullies, victims and prosocial students. Based on the halo effect phenomenon (Thorndike, 1920), we hypothesized a cognitive bias affecting teacher ability to recognize students’ characteristics. Specifically, bullying could be more likely to go undetected when teachers ascribe positive qualities to a certain student (i.e., high status and likeability, prosociality, academic competence). Secondly, teachers may fail to recognize victims when they are perceived as socially desirable (i.e., high status, likeability). Finally, teachers could tend to underestimate the prosocial behavior of the students who are perceived as engaged in negative conducts (i.e., externalizing behavior, bullying).

Using survey data from 1458 Dutch fifth grade primary school students (M age = 10.59, SD = 0.7, 47.4% girls) and 56 of their teachers (M age = 40.8, SD = 12.2, 66.1% female), teacher attunement was measured by comparing teacher’s reports to the proportion of received peer nominations per student for bullying, victimization, and prosociality. Additionally, teachers rated their students on the following characteristics: academic competence, peer status, likeability, internalizing and externalizing behavior. Using three different subsamples of students nominated by peers, respectively, as bully, victim, and prosocial, a logistic regression model with standard errors corrected for clustering within class was utilized to test our hypothesis on the dichotomous outcome score of teacher attunement (0 = Student not recognized by teacher, 1 = Student recognized by teacher).

Descriptive analyses showed a low overlap between teacher and peer reports; which was highest for prosocial behavior and lowest for victimization. Higher perceived likeability and prosociality were associated with decreased odds for teacher attunement to bullying, while higher perceived likeability and status were associated with decreased odds for teacher attunement to victimized students. Finally, teachers’ perception of externalizing behavior was associated with decreased odds for attunement to prosociality. These results suggest that teachers’ perceptions of the characteristics of their students have implications for teachers’ abilities to recognize and address bullying and victimization in their classrooms while promoting prosocial behaviors.

Authors

• Eleonora Marucci, University of Groningen
  Presenting Author

• Beau Oldenburg, University of Gröningen
  Non-Presenting Author

• Davide Barrera, University of Turin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rene Veenstra, University of Groningen
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marloes Hendrickx, Utrecht University
  Non-Presenting Author