Names, Grades, and Metamorphosis: A Small-Scale Socio-onomastic Investigation into the Effects of Ethnicity and Gender-Marked Personal Names on the Pedagogical Assessments of a Grade School Essay

Abstract

In this small-scale, mixed-method investigation, the potential presence of school teacher and teacher trainees’ name-based biases in reaction to schoolchildren’s first names was investigated in two experiments. In the first, German school teachers were asked to qualitatively and quantitatively assess an authentic literary essay written by a monolingual native-speaking German schoolchild. To test for possible name biases, three nearly identical versions of the essay were prepared. The only difference between them was the first names of the child listed as having authored the essay (Uwe, Achilleas, and Mustafa). In the second experiment, the set of personal names was expanded to include female first names (i.e. Heike, Athena, and Fatma) and the study participants were volunteer teacher trainees. In both experiments, evidence for covert name biases was identified. On the basis of these and other findings, the article concludes with concrete suggestions for future research. Chief among these recommendations is a call for more collaborative action research between university faculty and students.

Keywords:

• ethnicity
• gender
• bias
• teachers
• Germany
• action research

Acknowledgements

Special appreciation is given to F. Akkuş, U. Buschmann, P. Molochidis, and P. Schemensky for their tireless dedication in bringing this research project to fruition.

Notes

1. According to Greenwald et al. (1998, 1464), the psychological construct of an “implicit bias” refers to “actions or judgments that are under the control of automatically activated evaluation, without the performer’s awareness.”

2. Of course, it is impossible to rule out the effect of bias in the first grading of this essay. Had this work been assessed by a different instructor, it might have been awarded a different grade. However, this very real potential for inter-rater variation only serves to underscore the overall point that teacher assessments are susceptible to individual biases. (For more on this issue, see: Anderson-Clark et al. 2008; Baird 1998; Sprietsma 2013.)

3. To maintain the privacy of the student recruiters, their real first names were exchanged for ethnolinguistic equivalents.

4. The raw scores for the statistical percentages are provided in square brackets.