Teachers' Typology of Student Categories: A Cluster Analytic Study

The present study demonstrates the application of cluster analysis to examine the typology of student categories of novice Luxembourgish teachers. Student categories are mental representations of groups of students in which teachers classify their students. The investigation of student categories is a relevant topic in education, because subsequent assessments of students may be biased by prior classification. Eighty two novice Luxemburgish teachers were asked to mention types of students they became acquainted with during teaching and described these types by characterizing attributes. Twenty types of students and 65 characterizing attributes were frequently mentioned by the teachers. These data formed the basis of a hierarchical-agglomerative cluster analysis, using average-linkage and completelinkage clustering methods. The average-linkage-method resulted in 10 clusters, which were largely resembled by the resulting clusters of the complete-linkagemethod. This indicates a clear structure in the student categories of Luxembourgish novice teachers. The clusters are compared to Hofer’s (Informationsverarbeitung und Entscheidungsverhalten von Lehrern, Beiträge zu einer Handlungstheorie des Unterrichtens, Urban & Schwarzenberg, München, 1981) typology of student categories. The comparison leads to the assumption that the content of student categories may be partly influenced by educational and political discussion. 1 Stereotypes and Teacher–Student Interaction Almost all forms of teaching in education include an intensive social interaction between teachers and their students. During this interaction, teachers perceive innumerable information about students. This information is in turn a necessary T. Hörstermann ( ) S. Krolak-Schwerdt University of Luxembourg, Route de Diekirch, L-7220 Walferdange, Luxembourg e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] W. Gaul et al. (eds.), Challenges at the Interface of Data Analysis, Computer Science, and Optimization, Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-24466-7 56, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 547 548 T. Hörstermann and S. Krolak-Schwerdt component for subsequent teaching. Collecting information to assess students’ capabilities, personalities, performance etc. is a prerequisite of a teacher’s work. He can only act pedagogically and teach effectively when he is familiar with his students (Klauer 1978). For this information to be applicable in subsequent teaching the teacher has to encode and organize this information into a cognitive representation of students that is stored in memory. Assumptions about the structure of this cognitive representation can be derived from findings of cognitive psychology which state that repeated exposure to persons perceived as similar leads to the abstraction of a cognitive category in which common information about the persons is integrated. Person categories are also termed stereotypes in social cognition research (Aronson et al. 2004). Referring to the interaction between teachers and students, cognitive categories summarizing groups of students are termed student stereotypes. A student stereotype is the cognitive representation of students who are perceived as similar by the teacher in one or more attributes (Hofer 1981). In this paper, we present the findings of an empirical study on student stereotypes that teachers possess and the typological representation of such stereotypes in teachers’ cognitions. Using stereotypes in the information processing about students is of special interest for the investigation of the interaction between teachers and students, because it can exert influence on a teacher’s subsequent grading of students’ performance and can guide teachers’ behavior towards the students. In general, this influence can be seen as highly adaptive. It allows the inference of missing information about a person from the corresponding stereotype and facilitates the formation of expectancies of a person’s future behavior (Jussim 2005), thus leading to a more “predictable” world (Pendry 2007). Nevertheless, the use of stereotypes may lead to undesired effects, e.g. confirmation biases and self-fulfilling prophecies (Klayman and Ha 1987; Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968). Regarding the interaction between teachers and students, these effects might be especially problematic when the content of a student stereotype contains performance information (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968). In this case, an inferred expectancy of low performance of a student may cause teachers to focus on further indicators of low performance (confirmation bias) and to alter their behavior accordingly, e.g. by giving less challenging tasks, that in turn can result in actual low performance of a student (self-fulfilling prophecy). 1.1 Empirical Findings on Student Stereotypes that Teachers Possess The existence of student stereotypes of experienced German teachers was demonstrated by a cluster analytical study of Hofer (1981). The study reports a typology of five student stereotypes which were labeled as der Klassenprimus (No. 1 in class), der Arbeiter (the working student), der extrovertierte Schüler (the extroverted student), der introvertiert-sensible Schüler (the introverted-sensitive student) and Teachers’ Typology of Student Categories: A Cluster Analytic Study 549 der schlechte Schüler (the bad student). The No. 1 in class characterizes intelligent and active students who receive good grades and are willing to invest much effort. The working student is a talented and industrious student working with high discipline. In social interaction, he tends to be calm and humble. The extroverted student shows outstanding social activity, whereas the introverted-sensitive student is shy and withdrawn. The bad student lacks ability and motivation. He shows bad working behavior and does not take part in classroom interactions. 1.2 Research Question Hofer’s study (Hofer 1981) illustrated the existence of student stereotypes of teachers and the person attributes characterizing these stereotypes. Nevertheless, the utility of Hofer’s typology might be limited by now for further investigations of classroom interactions due to the fact that it reflects student stereotypes of teachers at the beginning of the 1980s. Actual discussions on the topic of classroom interactions frequently refer to aggressive or unattentive behavior of students as examples of possible new ways of categorizing students which can be found in the domain of pedagogy as well as in the media. This in turn may have changed student stereotypes that teachers use in judging students’ performance and classroom behavior. Therefore, the aim of this study is the investigation of recent student stereotypes and to compare them to Hofer’s typology.