Nonverbal communication and leakage in the behavior of biased and unbiased teachers.

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In this article we present a brief exposure method of assessing teachers' verbal and nonverbal behavior. Highly biased and unbiased teachers were videotaped addressing their classes, and judges rated randomized 10-s clips. Leakage, the transmission of more positive affect in controllable channels while negative affect is given away involuntarily in less controllable channels, was assessed by linear contrast analyses of three channels in a leakage hierarchy: transcript of speech content, face, and body. As hypothesized, biased teachers demonstrated systematic and substantial leakage effects in affective variables (factor-based, composite scores reflecting dogmatic behavior and negative affect), whereas unbiased teachers showed no leakage. As predicted, no leakage was found for any group in active teaching behavior, a nonaffective composite variable. Biased and unbiased teachers did not differ in comparisons for each separate channel. These findings are consistent with previous findings on differences between biased and unbiased teachers. It is now well established that students' social class and ethnicity serve as major variables in the formation of teachers' expectations for students' intellectual performance (Baron, Tom, & Cooper, 1985; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). Teachers differ importantly, however, in the degree to which they are susceptible to such stereotypically biasing information. Babad (1979) has developed a behavioral measure of susceptibility to biasing information based on the Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test (Harris, 1963) and has used it successfully to identify personality and behavioral differences between those who are highly susceptible to biasing information and those who are relatively unsusceptible to bias (Babad, 1979; Babad &Inbar, 1981). Babad, Inbar, and Rosenthal (1982a) showed that highly biased teachers, identified through this instrument, differed from unbiased teachers in that the former manifested strong self-fulfilling expectancy effects (both Pygmalion [positive] and Golem [negative] effects) in their own differential behavior and in the performance of their students. In this study we used this measure to identify highly biased and unbiased teachers, and compared various verbal and nonverbal components in their teaching style, as part of an overall attempt to understand how expectations affect teacher and student behavior. To use Babad's (1979) measure, each respondent is taught the scoring procedures of the Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test (Harris, 1963) and is then asked (under the guise of a reliability exercise) to score two drawings allegedly drawn by a child of high ethnic and socioeconomic status (SES) and by a child of low status. The drawings were actually duplicated from the test manual, so their objective scores were known. They are almost of equal quality, and the drawing attributed to the high-status child is awarded in the test manual 3 points more than the drawing attributed to the low-status child. The difference between the scores attributed to the two drawings by a given respondent (adjusted for the objective 3-point difference) serves in this instrument as a measure of that respondent's susceptibility to bias.