Teacher Bias in Assessments by Student Ascribed Status: A Factorial Experiment on Discrimination and Cultural Reproduction
Fair evaluations are fundamental for equal opportunity, with teachers as gatekeepers of academic merit in educational systems. Still, identifying their direct role in reproducing or mitigating inequalities via assessments is empirically challenging, yielding inconsistent findings on teacher bias from observational and experimental studies. We test interdisciplinary theories of status characteristics beliefs, statistical discrimination, and cultural reproduction with a pre-registered factorial experiment run on a large representative sample of Spanish pre-service teachers (n=1,717). This design causally identifies, net of true academic competence, the impact of student-ascribed status characteristics—gender, migrant and class origins—and cultural capital on teacher short- and long-term assessments, improving prior studies’ limitations regarding theory testing, confounding, and power. Findings reveal teacher bias in an immediate task of essay grading favoring girls and highbrow cultural capital signals, aligning with status characteristics and cultural reproduction theories, respectively. Concerning teachers’ long-term expectations, findings hint at statistical discrimination against boys, migrant-origin, and working-class students under uncertain information. Unexpectedly, ethnic discrimination changes from teachers favoring native origin in long-term expectations to migrant origin in essay evaluations, suggesting compensatory grading practices. These findings dig deeper into the complex roots of discrimination in teacher assessments as a mechanism underlying educational (in)equality.
GIL HERNANDEZ Carlos;
PAÑEDA-FERNÁNDEZ Irene;
SALAZAR Leire;
CASTAÑO MUÑOZ Jonatan;
2024-02-29
European Commission
JRC136851
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC136851,
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