Events

Abstract: Teachers tend to hold lower expectations and give lower track recommendations to children from typically disadvantaged social and/or ethnic groups. These differential teacher expectations lead to disparities in students’ day-to-day experiences in school, and are believed to contribute to the persisting inequalities in educational attainment in Western societies.

Until now, research has largely ignored the role of the institutional context, at both the national and the school-level, in understanding inequalities in teacher expectations and track recommendations. However, at the national level, educational institutions, such as tracking procedures, may influence the extent to which teachers base their expectations on students’ demographic traits. Within a national context of early tracking, the level of formalization and accountability of (tracking) guidelines and procedures in school could influence social inequality in teacher expectations. Using newly performed vignette experiments, I compare the impact of various student and family traits on teacher expectations in different national and school contexts.

Teacher expectations and track recommendations can function as a signal to student, and may come to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, ‘high’ teacher expectations and track placements may boost students’ academic self-concept, expectations, and subsequent school engagement and performance; whereas ‘low’ teacher expectations and track placements do the exact opposite. More importantly, students from different backgrounds may respond to these tracking signals in diverse ways, thereby either exacerbating or reducing existing educational inequalities. Using German panel data, I examine how students from different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds respond to their track placement in terms of their educational expectations.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Hilary Term is convened by Richard Breen and Janne Jonsson. For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.