Teachers are the main guardians of academic merit, so their evaluations are essential to guarantee equal opportunities. Whether teachers are guided only by the curricular competencies and effort of their students, or whether they also consider other factors, such as their sociodemographic characteristics, is a crucial question to identify potential biases and discrimination in the educational system.
Due to social desirability, detecting these biases from traditional survey data is not possible; Experimental designs are required, which have been scarce until now in analyzes of the Spanish educational field. Normally, to study evaluation biases, students with similar performance in standardized tests (for example, PISA) are compared to determine whether, with equal competencies, they have a different grade or probability of repeating a year depending on their sex, migrant origin or level. socioeconomic status of the family.
This entry collects the results of an experiment designed by ourselves and that we have recently published in Sociological Science. The experiment is specifically designed to causally identify whether, beyond academic merit, the assigned characteristics of the students (sex, migrant origin, social class) enter into the teachers’ equation when assigning grades and predicting the future school trajectories of their students. .
To design the experiment, we selected a representative sample of 20 faculties of education in all the Spanish CCAA (non-bilingual), both public and private, and distributed a questionnaire among their enrollees. on-line. We focused on student teachers instead of practicing teachers because we were interested in evaluating whether, even before entering the educational system as professionals, young people reproduce (pre)existing group stereotypes in society and the school itself. If so (spoiler: it is), interventions and curricular (re)designs on the cognitive and institutional processes that generate discrimination could be particularly effective during the teacher training period.
In the questionnaire on-line distributed to the future teachers, a sheet (Figure 1) was presented with the personal and academic data of a fictitious 6th grade student and, then, they were asked to rate an essay, written by him/her, and Evaluate your future school career. The sheet, based on real files, provided neutral census information, common to all profiles (center, family address, nationality, date of birth) and variable information (blue sections of the sheet in Figure 1) about the sociodemographic characteristics of the student: sex, migrant origin (Spanish or Moroccan parents) and the father’s profession, camouflaged in the contact information, as a marker of socioeconomic status. Thus, we had files for Daniel García González, Lucía García González, Youssef Salhi, Salma Salhi and the contact emails of their parents were, in the first two cases, [email protected] or David.Garcia@Notarios- Garcia.es and, in the second two, [email protected] or [email protected]. The form also provided information about the student’s previous school performance, behavior in class, and compliance with tasks and duties. These behavioral factors are crucial, since teachers, explicitly or not, also take them into account in their evaluations.
Respondents were then presented with a short essay describing a landscape and the passing of the seasons. This essay had two versions according to its objective quality based on official rubrics of the language subject for 6th grade (spelling, vocabulary, syntax) and validated through a pilot study with 250 Andalusian teachers: a good version (7 out of 10) and another Worst quality version (5 out of 10). In addition, we manipulated two other factors — independent of the quality of the writing. On the one hand, we incorporated a phrase as a signal to inadvertently remember the socioeconomic status of the father (notary or painter in the construction sector) and, on the other, we slipped information about the family’s cultural capital by referring to two leisure activities directly. in the text: watching the television program “Temptation Island” or Monet’s impressionist paintings in a museum. Figure 2 presents the good and bad versions of the wording and, in color, the various experimental manipulations that were done.
Respondents were then asked to evaluate the quality of the writing and, in addition, to assess how likely it is (a) that this student will repeat 6th grade and (b) that he or she will reach high school. Given that good or bad writing has been completely randomly assigned, in addition to the behavior and previous performance of the record, to the different sociodemographic profiles of students, we can causally identify the weight that teachers attribute to objective or demonstrated academic ability ( that is, the quality of the writing, previous performance and effort) in comparison with the ascribed factors, that is, those sociodemographic factors over which the student has no control (biological sex, the origin of their parents or the socioeconomic resources and cultural capital of their home).
We can highlight several main results of the experiment, which we illustrate in Figure 3. First the good news: ability (especially the objective quality of writing and behavior) is what weighs most in the grade obtained in the task and also in the predictions that respondents make about the student’s future school success. Then the bad news: in all cases, assigned factors creep in that, in principle, with equal academic merit, should not affect grades or expectations regarding future school success. Girls receive somewhat higher grades and are credited with more future success than merit-related factors would predict (there are several explanations consistent with this, which are explained in the article). Something similar happens with socioeconomic status: the children of notaries receive better omens about their school future than the children of painters with equal ability and effort. Furthermore, writing in an essay that shows “Temptation Island” instead of Monet paintings in a museum results in a lower grade, even though both essays are equally good with regard to objective linguistic criteria. evaluable. The case of children of Moroccan origin is somewhat less intuitive. They receive more marks than they deserve in the editorial office. This form of positive discrimination may be due to teachers trying to compensate for the added difficulty that a task related to linguistic skills implies for students who do not normally speak this language at home. However, they are later attributed a lower probability than a student of Spanish family origin of entering high school, something that coincides more with the stubborn empirical reality.
In the scientific article we discuss extensively the various theoretical explanations that may be behind these results (statistical discrimination, implicit biases, group stereotypes); We refer interested readers to it. We would like to focus here on the substantive conclusion. Consciously or not, teachers take as merit some characteristics that are not actually related to it, such as sex, social class or the country of origin of the students’ family. When we talk about educational inequalities and the factors that explain the intergenerational reproduction of educational advantages and disadvantages, we normally look at the role of families and students. However, teachers are the main judges of educational merit and directly determine who advances and who does not in the school career. Explicitly or not, they send continuous signals to the students themselves and their families that influence the decisions that are made, sometimes in the form of self-fulfilling prophecies. In the study we show, with the most appropriate evidence so far, that teachers do indeed play a fundamental role as guarantors of equal opportunities. Although it is not obvious what type of measures could be taken to reinforce this function, empirically establishing the existence of these biases is a first step in this direction.
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