Students often receive feedback that conveys expectations linked to their socioeconomic background
As a university student studying psychology, I observed classrooms in a local elementary school to learn more about teacher feedback. On one occasion, an 11-year-old boy named Mark received a six out of 10 on a test he had taken a week earlier. In response to his disappointment, the boy’s teacher said, “It’s okay, Mark—not everyone has to be an Einstein.”
Even well-intentioned educators may unknowingly send discouraging messages to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In recent research, my colleague Constantine Sedikides, a social psychologist at the University of Southampton in England, and I have drawn on multiple studies to examine this problem and have shown how these messages can become ingrained in children’s mind.
That pattern has been observed in many countries, including the U.S. While this socioeconomic bias can intersect with biases against race and ethnicity, it is clearly an additional powerful factor that shapes children’s educational experience. A study in the U.K. found that when teachers evaluate their students’ work, they tend to give lower grades to those from a poorer background, even when these students perform as well as their peers.
These inadvertently denigrating messages may, over time, become ingrained in children’s mind. As I and others have found, children from a lower socioeconomic background tend to have more negative views about themselves. They see themselves as less intelligent, less able to grow their intelligence, less deserving and less worthy—even if they are as smart and high-achieving as others.
In response, societies need to address the entrenched issues—such as the belief in meritocracy—that pervade our educational system. To do so, we can promote socioeconomic desegregation in schools and improve the social integration of children from different backgrounds. Such changes would render inequality of opportunity more visible to children, parents, teachers and policymakers.
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