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Children from lower socio-economic backgrounds receive lower grades due to unconscious bias, reveals new study.

Children from lower socio-economic backgrounds are judged to produce poorer quality school work than children from higher socio-economic backgrounds, a new study has revealed.

26 August 2022

By BPS Communications

Published in the BPS' British Journal of Educational Psychology, the study found that teachers judged an identical piece of work as being of poorer quality if it was presented as being written by a student of lower, rather than higher socio-economic status (SES).

The findings highlight the unconscious biases that could be contributing to the relative underperformance of children from poorer backgrounds.

416 in-service and trainee teachers took part in the study which found that teachers who graded the work of a student from lower SES were significantly harsher in their grading compared to those who were shown the work of a student of higher SES, with a 4.4 per cent grading difference.

As well as grading the piece of work, teachers were also asked to place the child in an English set based on their ability and potential, with students of lower SES allocated to lower ability groups than those from higher SES backgrounds.

Lewis Doyle, lead researcher on the story, said:

"We believe this study is clear evidence that unconscious biases relating to children's socio-economic status can have an impact on the grading of students' work and their subsequent educational outcomes.

We all have unconscious biases in one way or another, so we are adamant that these findings should not be deemed an attack on teachers, who often have the unenviable role of facilitating the learning of large groups whilst under a number of other cognitively and emotionally draining pressures.

Instead, it should be used as a mandate for educational institutions to better support teachers with improved training to mitigate potential biases and to better understand the dangers of perceiving the education system as meritocratic."

The findings come as the BPS recently launched a campaign calling for social class to be made a protected characteristic under the 2010 Equalities Act, with this study's co-author Dr Matthew Easterbrook contributing a report on social class in education.

The findings also revealed that the more teachers believed that schooling is meritocratic – the idea that students truly do get what they deserve - the less supportive they were for equity-enhancing initiatives such as the implementation of teaching practices to support a diverse student population.

The authors also stress that the absence of any main effects of ethnicity on teacher grading should be taken with extreme caution, as other evidence suggests that racial biases are prevalent in teacher judgements in the UK and abroad. It could be that teachers are becoming more aware of ethnicity biases and are thus better able to monitor and inhibit such influences. If true, this would provide hope for the tempering of SES and other biases.

Read the full study in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. 

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