Teachers’ Implicit Attitudes Toward Ethnic Minority Students: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Although instruments to assess implicit attitudes were introduced more than 20 years ago, still there are few studies in the field of education that use them, despite the evidence that teachers with negative implicit attitudes can negatively affect the academic performance of their students. This review aims to summarize the results of studies that investigated the relationship between implicit ethnic attitudes of teachers and achievement of students. The review was conducted according to PRISMA-statement through searches in the scientific database PsychINFO, PsycARTICLES, and ERIC. Nineteen studies were included. Results show that overall teachers (from different school levels and different countries) hold negative implicit attitudes toward ethnic minority students, which play an important role in affecting the academic path of these groups of students. This review highlights the need to continue to use implicit attitudes procedures in future researches, in order to identify those factors that may contribute to the formation and expression of implicit attitudes of teachers; and the need to increase awareness of the implicit attitudes and multicultural practices of teachers in teaching programs.

Why Is Murat’s Achievement So Low? Causal Attributions and Implicit Attitudes Toward Ethnic Minority Students Predict Preservice Teachers’ Judgments About Achievement

“…However, as the focus of attitude assessment has shifted toward the examination of implicit evaluations ( Sritharan and Gawronski, 2010 ), research from the educational field has indicated that teachers show more negative implicit attitudes toward ethnic minority students ( Glock et al, 2020 ). The same results have been found for preservice teachers, who tend to exhibit less favorable implicit attitudes toward ethnic minority students than toward ethnic majority students ( Costa et al, 2021 ). Explicit attitudes are often assessed with self-report measures ( Sritharan and Gawronski, 2010 ); implicit attitudes, however, are calculated from response latencies on tasks involving indirect measurement methods ( Wittenbrink and Schwarz, 2007 ).…”

“…The most prominent method for accessing implicit attitudes is the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al, 1998 ), which is used to calculate participants’ reaction times as they make cognitive associations. When applied to teachers’ implicit attitudes, it is assumed that teachers are quicker to assign positive attributes to ethnic majority students and negative attributes to ethnic minority students, the more strongly these concepts are cognitively linked ( Costa et al, 2021 ). Hence, if the targets and attributes are strongly linked, the response latencies are shorter ( Greenwald et al, 1998 ).…”

“…This judgmental bias concerning ethnic minority students also holds in Germany (e.g., Tobisch and Dresel, 2017 ; Bonefeld and Dickhäuser, 2018 ), where the largest ethnic minority group has Turkish roots ( Statistisches Bundesamt, 2021 ). Besides teachers’ low expectations, their attitudes are potentially another major factor of this ethnic bias ( Costa et al, 2021 ). Attitudes as evaluations of a social group ( Eagly and Chaiken, 1993 ) can be divided into implicit attitudes , which occur automatically and usually outside of awareness, and explicit attitudes , which require conscious reasoning ( Gawronski and Bodenhausen, 2006 ).…”

“…Attitudes as evaluations of a social group ( Eagly and Chaiken, 1993 ) can be divided into implicit attitudes , which occur automatically and usually outside of awareness, and explicit attitudes , which require conscious reasoning ( Gawronski and Bodenhausen, 2006 ). The vast majority of studies have shown that teachers hold negative implicit attitudes toward ethnic minority students ( Pit-ten Cate and Glock, 2019 ; Costa et al, 2021 ). In addition, expectations and evaluations are shaped by teachers’ causal attributions—an individual’s explanations for success or failure ( Weiner, 2000 )—for students’ outcomes ( Reyna, 2008 ).…”

Expanding the social psychological study of educators through humanizing principles

“…For instance, studies consistently reveal that educators hold more negative attitudes toward their students from minoritized ethnic‐racial groups compared to their students from non‐minoritized backgrounds (e.g., Peterson et al., 2016). In turn, these beliefs prejudice educators' expectations and evaluations of their students' academic potential, and subsequently undermine the achievement of students from minoritized ethnic‐racial backgrounds (see Costa et al., 2021). Educators' expectations for their students have also been shown to contribute to inequalities between students from lower and higher SES backgrounds (e.g., Sorhagen, 2013), as educators tend to expect less from lower SES students.…”