Shifting Standards When Judging Male and Female Majority and Minority Students’ Non-Suitability for the Academic Track?

Abstract

Abstract: Because tracking recommendations can be impactful for students’ educational paths, it is important to understand how they may be influenced by students’ social group memberships. The Shifting Standards Model predicts that teachers show both negative and positive biases toward students belonging to stereotyped groups, and that this depends on the framing of the context. In a 2 (student’s ethnicity: Turkish vs. German) × 2 (student’s gender: male vs. female) × 2 (standard: minimum vs. confirmatory) between-subjects design, n = 185 student teachers indicated how much evidence of learning-detrimental behavior they needed to see from a student before suspecting vs. being certain (minimum vs. confirmatory standards) that the student was not suitable for the academic track. The predictions of the Shifting Standards Model were unexpectedly not supported. We discuss these results in relation to the usefulness of parsimonious theoretical arguments as well as an intersectional analysis of tracking recommendations.