Academic Expectations of Australian Students from Aboriginal, Asian and Anglo Backgrounds: Perspectives of Teachers, Trainee-teachers and Students

Abstract

There are ethnic group differences in academic achievement among Australian students, with Aboriginal students performing substantially below and Asian students above their peers. One factor that may contribute to these effects is societal stereotypes of Australian Asian and Aboriginal students, which may bias teachers’ evaluations and influence student outcomes. A questionnaire assessing academic expectancies for hypothetical students from different ethnic groups was administered to 55 experienced teachers and 144 training teachers. A measure of self-expectancies and group expectancies was administered to 516 school students. The findings revealed that Asian students were expected to perform better in mathematics and expend greater effort than Aboriginal and Anglo-Australian students. In turn, there were higher expectancies for mathematics performance for Anglo-Australian students compared with Aboriginal students. We discuss the potential implications of these stereotypes for students’ school achievement, particularly the risk that negative implicit stereotypes might result in these students being directed to special education.

Keywords:

• Aboriginal Australian
• Asian Australian
• ethnicity
• expectancies
• self-stereotyping
• stereotype threat
• stereotypes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all participating students and teachers, and Kate Harwood for her assistance with data collection and analysis. No restrictions have been imposed on free access to, or publication of, the research data.

Notes

1. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are the indigenous people of Australia who constitute approximately 3% of the population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011).

2. This was achieved by converting scores to a common denominator of 35 for the analyses, then dividing by their scale dimension (five or seven) for representation in the tables here.

3. Preliminary analyses revealed no significant differences between these groups in self-expectancies and one small interaction effect (ethnic group by item, with Vietnamese participants rating their group higher for effort than other items, compared with the other groups) for group expectancies.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a UWA research grant to the first two authors.