About this session

Friday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Unequal Treatment in the Classroom: Origins and Consequences

Teachers play an important role in addressing inequality in the classroom. In some cases, however, teachers may treat students unequally. For example, they may treat students differently based on stereotypes (e.g., about students’ race/ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status), which can perpetuate disparities in achievement. To date, little research has directly tested the origins and consequences of unequal treatment. This symposium fills these gaps integrating behavioral experiments, an experiment in a Virtual Reality (VR) classroom, and semi-structured interviews methods across geographical regions (Netherlands, United States, Kyrgyzstan).

Paper 1 shows that teachers’ unequal treatment is at least partially due to school resources (e.g., class size, limited internet access). Paper 2 suggests that, contrary to hypotheses, unequal praise (receiving praise while an equally performing classmate does not, or vice versa) does not influence 8-12 year-olds’ beliefs about their intellect, possibly due to limited awareness of the comparison. Paper 3 finds that 5- to 7-year-olds predict that teachers rely on gender stereotypes to assign tasks to students, and surprisingly, evaluate these behaviors positively. Paper 4 shows that 8- to 14-year-olds increasingly evaluate teachers’ racial-ethnic bias negatively, even if their own racial-ethnic group was not affected by the bias.

These studies show that structural factors can cause unequal treatment in the classroom, and that children are sensitive to subtle manifestations of unequal treatment. The work also reveals a strikingly protracted development of children’s negative evaluation of teachers who treat students unequally. This symposium highlights the nuances of unequal treatment and the challenges of addressing it.

Paper #1
Title	How Resources Shape Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices About Disadvantaged Students in the Kyrgyz Republic
Presenting author	Dr. Kelly Lynn Ziemer, Leiden University, Netherlands

Paper #2
Title	Does Teacher’s Praise Make You Feel Less Smart? A Virtual Reality (VR) Experiment
Presenting author	Ms. Lena-Emilia Schenker, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Paper #3
Title	Young Children Expect and Approve of Adults’ Gender Stereotypes
Presenting author	Marianna Zhang, New York University, United States

Paper #4
Title	Children’s Evaluations and Predictions About Teacher Racial-Ethnic Bias
Presenting author	Elise Marie Kaufman, M.Ed., University of Maryland, College Park, United States

View all paper details

Session chairs
Ms. Lena-Emilia Schenker, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands; Eddie Brummelman, Ph.D., , Netherlands

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