Educators Systematically Over-Predict Student Anxiety in Response to Hypothetical Vignettes

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Education, Schooling

Abstract

Teacher-student interactions greatly impact the classroom environment and students’ academic and social outcomes (Cipriano, Barnes, Kolev, Rivers, & Brackett, 2019). Educators’ assumptions about students’ emotions shape their response to student behavior and what supports they offer to them in the classroom (McHugh, Horner, Colditz, & Wallace, 2013). It is therefore important to examine biases educators may have in their assumptions about students’ emotions. We examined this question by asking both students and educators to predict the emotions that students would experience in hypothetical school situations.

During pilot-testing of a new vignette-based assessment of students’ emotion regulation, we collected data via an online survey from a small sample of secondary school students (n = 48) and educators (n = 34). Student participants were enrolled in an inner-city charter school and a middle and high school in a small town. Students were predominantly white (83% white, non-Hispanic; 7% multiracial; 4% Asian; 2% Black, non-Hispanic; 2% Hispanic/Latino; 2% other). Their median household income was $180,000 (25th percentile = $75,000; 75th percentile = $350,000). The mean student age was 12.6 years (SD = 1.6, range = 11 – 17), and 62% of the student sample was female. Educators were recruited from the same schools as the student sample (n = 14) and through social media distribution of the online survey link (n = 20). The majority (71%) were female with a mean of 12.4 (SD = 7.7) years of experience working in secondary schools. Educators were also predominantly white (91% white; 3% multiracial; 3% Black; 3% American Indian/Alaska Native). Most of the educators (87%) reported working in a public or charter school. About 79% were classroom teachers, 9% were school counselors, 9% were school psychologists, and 4% were school social workers.

Students and educators were presented with sixteen identical vignettes depicting interpersonal and academic situations in school that were expected to elicit anger, anxiety, sadness, or boredom. Educators were asked how many students, in the grade level with which they are most familiar, would experience each emotion (happiness, anger, anxiety, sadness, and boredom) on a scale from 1 (none) to 5 (all) if this situation happened to them (see Table 1). Students were asked which emotion they would feel if the situation depicted in the vignette happened to them (see Table 2).

We found that educators systematically over-predicted the likelihood that students would experience anxiety across various academic and interpersonal situations. Specifically, educators predicted that “many,” “most,” or “all” students would experience anxiety in 63% of the vignettes that were written to depict anger or sadness, whereas only 2 - 10% of students reported that they would feel anxious in these situations. Inaccurate assumptions about students’ emotions can adversely affect how educators respond to students’ emotional expression and behaviors in the classroom. These results highlight the importance of encouraging educators to ask students about their emotional experiences rather than relying on their potentially inaccurate assumptions.

Authors

• Morgan Debra Mannweiler, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Cynthia Jean Willner, Yale School of Medicine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Zi Jia Ng, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jessica D Hoffmann, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marc Brackett, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author