Abstract
Although educational research acknowledges that social perception processes are relevant for understanding but also evaluating situations, the topic of impression management (IM) has achieved only little attention so far. Individuals have discussed rather as passively exposed to the mechanism of social interaction and perception processes. This contribution changes perspectives and addresses the question of conscious impression management within classes. The chapter asks whether students use self-presentation tactics in order to deliberately navigate the impression their teachers should have of them. By means of an empirical study, country- and gender-specific differences with regard to impression management were found. Likewise, students with a high educational aspiration and good school grades scored higher or at least differently on impression management than students with a low educational aspiration level and low school grades. And students with a high educational aspiration but low grades try to overcome this discrepancy by means of personally adapting to the teachers’ expectations. Even though the influence mechanism of impression management on school success cannot conclusively be answered, this paper opens new perspectives on the scientific discourse of social inequality as well as teaching quality and discusses implications for teacher education.
Highlights
Teaching can be understood as a form of pedagogical action and communication
Since all students questioned were at a grammar school which prepares them for university entrance, it is not surprising that 65% of the respondents are aiming for an education at university
In order to test Hypothesis 1 that students from Austrian grammar schools differ in their average on impression management (IM) in math teaching from students from Swiss grammar schools, t-tests for independent groups were calculated by means of the statistical program SPSS (Version 24)
Summary
Teaching can be understood as a form of pedagogical action and communication (cf. [1]). As numerous social-psychological studies have shown (cf [4, 5]), mutual perception is (socially) constructed and dependent on attitudes, expectations and experiences Such expectations, norms and rules exist at school, as the following quote illustrates: “At school, teachers and students interact. Norms and rules exist at school, as the following quote illustrates: “At school, teachers and students interact Their actions are linked to social expectations and roles. As, for instance, the following references [9, 10] emphasised, students, who are perceived as more committed by their teacher often have better grades than those who are perceived as less committed, with the same school performance In this context, Reichenbach [11] speaks of privileged students and means that those students who know and understand how to present themselves according to expectations and norms have a higher chance of success at school. Despite its obvious significance, IM of students has received little interest from educational research so far
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