Cognitive processing about classroom-relevant contexts: Teachers' attention to and utilization of girls' body size, ethnicity, attractiveness, and facial affect.

Abstract

This study examines 2 aspects of cognitive processing in person perception-attention and decision making-in classroom-relevant contexts. Teachers completed 2 implicit, performance-based tasks that characterized attention to and utilization of 4 student characteristics of interest: ethnicity, facial affect, body size, and attractiveness. Stimuli were 24 full-body photos of girls that varied along the dimensions of interest. Teachers completed a similarity-ratings task and 4 preference-ratings tasks. Results showed that teachers attended to ethnicity and body size but did not utilize this information when selecting students across contexts. In contrast, teachers relied heavily on affect and attractiveness when making decisions. These results suggest that further investigating cognitive processing in person perception is important in understanding how teachers attend to and use multiple salient student attributes in real-world contexts. This study also illustrates the potential utility of adopting a method that places a premium on internal validity to investigate questions relevant to educational researchers. Future work should investigate how other student information, such as student background or personality, affects teachers' cognitive processing in different classroom-relevant contexts.

An Experimental Assessment of Physical Educators' Expectations and Attitudes: The Importance of Student Weight and Gender

“…T eachers' perceptions and expectations of their students may be influenced by numerous factors including biologically based features such as race and gender, 1 and appearance-related features such as physical attractiveness and facial expressions. 2 Teachers' perceptions and expectations of their students are also influenced by body weight. 3 Unfortunately, overweight individuals are frequently the targets of weight bias in educational settings by their teachers and peers.…”

I. Introduction

“…We tentatively posit that the total effect of attractiveness on grades will be positive. This expectation is tentative given conflicting evidence in the small number of empirical studies reviewed above associating looks with grades in adolescence (Felson, 1980; Lerner et al, 1990; Sparacino & Hansell, 1979; Zebrowitz, Andreoletti, Collins, Lee, & Blumenthal, 1998; 2002), although there is more consistent evidence of a positive attribution bias by elementary school teachers in the social psychological literature (Ritts et al, 1992; Wang et al, 2008) and of the better looking earning more in the economics and organizational psychology literatures (Hamermesh & Biddle, 1994; Hamermesh et al, 2002; Harper, 2000; Hosoda et al, 2003). Again, evidence for these hypotheses in Add Health will generate new questions, such as the more nuanced daily interactions that produce these offsetting paths.…”

“…Some research has also extended this basic pattern to physical attractiveness, although it has focused on children in elementary school, primarily from experimental studies of teachers’ expectations for students’ performance based on their physical appearance (e.g., see Ritts, Patterson, & Tubbs, 1992 for an early review and Wang, Treat, & Brownell, 2008 for recent evidence). In short, this literature demonstrates that the general tendency for attractive people to be positively perceived by others on a variety of dimensions (adjustment, social skills) extends to children and to the academic domain, with better-looking elementary school-age children rated by others as having higher levels of academic competence (see the meta-analysis by Langlois et al, 2000).…”

Context-Dependent Personalised Feedback Prioritisation in Exploratory Learning for Mathematical Generalisation

“…Context could bring valuable information that would make help more appropriate and, thus, more effective. Context-awareness has been studied in a diversity of domains like artificial intelligence [1], ubiquitous computing [2], educational psychology [3] and recommender systems [4]. The definition of context is also diverse, varying from the wide social context to the specificity of network characteristics.…”