The role of preservice teachers’ implicit attitudes and causal attributions: a deeper look into students’ ethnicity

Abstract

Previous research has provided evidence that teachers implicitly hold more negative attitudes toward ethnic minority students than toward ethnic majority students. Furthermore, they attribute the lower educational success of ethnic minority students predominantly to internal causes. So far, it is not known how implicit attitudes and causal attributions are related to preservice teachers’ judgments of students’ academic competencies. We conducted a study to close this research gap. In a sample of preservice teachers, our study showed mainly negative implicit attitudes toward ethnic minority students. On general, the preservice teachers made external attributions. Implicit attitudes as well as causal attributions predicted the judgments. Preservice teachers with more negative attitudes and preservice teachers, who attributed the failure of ethnic minority students to these students’ abilities, less favorably judged the competence of ethnic minority students. Our results highlight the role of teachers’ attitudes and causal attributions in determining the disadvantages that ethnic minority students experience in school.

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

“…Internal stable attributions of low success in school and more negative implicit attitudes led to lower language performance ratings. The internal attributions are in line with previous research ( Froehlich et al, 2016 ; Glock and Kleen, 2021 ), but the separate consideration of internal variable and internal stable attributions is new and is especially interesting as previous research showed that ethnic minority students’ language problems were often attributed to low effort ( Agirdag et al, 2014 ) and thus to internal variable attributions. In the current study, the preservice teachers attributed the ethnic minority student’s German language proficiency to the student’s ability.…”

“…Based on this model, teachers’ implicit attitudes toward ethnic minority students as well as their causal attributions regarding ethnic minority students’ achievements may play an important role in ethnic minority students’ disadvantages in school. Concurrent with this assumption, research showed that preservice teachers with more negative attitudes toward ethnic minority students and a tendency to attribute academic failure to internal stable factors made less favorable judgments about ethnic minority students’ competence ( Glock and Kleen, 2021 ).…”

“…Such causal attributions may also affect teachers’ judgments of students’ performance. Likewise, if the failure of an ethnic minority student is attributed primarily to internal stable factors, the students’ competence is judged less favorably by preservice teachers ( Glock and Kleen, 2021 ).…”

“…However, it is not yet clear how these two factors—teachers’ implicit attitudes and causal attributions—affect teachers’ judgments in combination. To our knowledge, so far only one study by Glock and Kleen (2021) focused on this connection. Hence, the aim of this study is to investigate how implicit attitudes and causal attributions contribute to preservice teachers’ judgments of an ethnic minority student.…”

“…The novelties of this study are an altered and extended questionnaire to assess causal attributions to get a more thorough insight into preservice teachers’ causal attributions and above that, implicit attitudes were administered with three different indirect methods. Furthermore, and in contrast to the study by Glock and Kleen (2021) , a student vignette was employed to evaluate possible biased judgments of those preservice teachers.…”