Teachers’ prejudice toward SES and expectations of school engagement, learning abilities and parental involvement

Abstract

Summary: Earlier studies shows that teachers have more negative expectations of students’ school engagement and learning abilities and of parental involvement for students and parents with a low social economic status (SES) than they have for students and parents with high a SES. This could lead to educational inequalities. Teachers’ negative expectations of low SES students could be explained by teachers’ prejudice. Therefore, the current study examined to what extent primary school teachers’ implicitly measured prejudice toward SES, effects their expectations of the school involvement and learning abilities from fictional students and of parental involvement. A vignette study with questionnaire and an Implicit Association Test (IAT) were used. A Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed that there was no difference between teachers’ expectations of fictional students with high SES versus low SES. In addition, no significance effects of teachers’ prejudice toward SES on their expectations of a fictional student were found. This could possibly mean that teachers’ implicit prejudice towards SES does not play a significant role in teachers’ expectations of students.