Achievement development is less important for school-placement recommendations when students are stereotyped
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Achievement development is less important for school‑placement recommendations when students are stereotyped Florian Klapproth1 · Birthe Doreen Fischer2 Received: 16 April 2020 / Accepted: 16 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract With this study we examined with a sample of N = 102 primary-school teachers whether their use of information about students’ achievement development for placement recommendations depended on student ethnicity. We applied student vignettes to mimic real students, and orthogonally varied student ethnicity, their GPA development, suggested by their last two school reports in primary school, and their grand mean of grades. We found that students were more likely to be recommended for the highest track when their grand mean of grades indicated higher achievements and when their GPA improved rather than declined. Moreover, we found strong evidence that teachers applied ethnic stereotypes when making school-placement recommendations. If the students fitted an ethnic stereotype, teachers tend to ignore information about their achievement development, whereas if the students did not fit an ethnic stereotype, teachers’ judgments were rather based on all information that was provided about the students. Hence, achievement development was less important for school-placement recommendations when students were stereotyped than when they were not stereotyped. Implications of the results were discussed. Keywords Achievement development · School-placement recommendations · Teachers · Social stereotypes · Ethnicity · Experiment
1 Introduction School-placement is a form of ability grouping that is used in Germany and some other European countries (e.g. Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg) to assign primary-school students to different school tracks in secondary school by the students’ * Florian Klapproth florian.klapproth@medicalschool‑berlin.de 1
Medical School Berlin, Calandrellistrasse 1‑9, 12247 Berlin, Germany
2
University of Trier, Trier, Germany
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F. Klapproth, B. D. Fischer
ability level. The ability level is gauged by students’ school grades, which are the most important and decisive sources of information for teachers when they have to opt for a school track that a student should attend in secondary school. Recent evidence (Caro et al. 2009; Klapproth and Fischer 2019) suggests that teachers do also regard the students’ academic development for placement decisions. Students who improve in achievement usually are placed in a higher track than students who deteriorate. However, teachers might neglect students’ academic development when salient attributes of the students would allow for stereotyping them. Stereotyping students might be based on physical, social, or behavioral attributes (Fiske 1998). The present study examined whether students’ ethnicity contributes to stereotyping and results in biased school-placement decisions.
2 Theoretical and empirical background 2.1 Secondary school in Germany In Germany, school-placement is a permanent school administ
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