Combined Effects of Students´ Gender and Ethnicity on Teachers´ Stereotype-Based Expectations: A Systematic Review

Whilst student populations become increasingly heterogeneous, (inter)national large-scale studies report educational inequalities based on shared characteristics of different groups of students. Although differences in educational pathways may be related to interindividual differences in ability and achievement, these inequalities may also be affected by teachers´ beliefs and expectations. Research has demonstrated that teachers´ beliefs and expectations vary as a function of specific student characteristics, whereby teachers have lower expectations for the academic achievement of ethnic minority students (for a review, see Wang et al., 2018). In addition, teachers may have different expectations for boys and girls, especially in regard to domain specific achievement (i.e., mathematical and language proficiency; e.g., de Boer et al., 2010; Holder & Kessels, 2017) and classroom behavior (Arbuckle & Little, 2004; Glock, 2016).
Although students present themselves with more characteristics that can activate stereotypical beliefs, most research has focused on a single characteristic and little is known about the effect of the intersection of characteristics. To this extent, one could argue for a cumulative effect of ethnicity and gender, whereby stereotype-based expectations concerning ethnic minority students are amplified by the students´ gender (Ghavami & Peplau, 2012), an interaction effect, whereby different characteristics interact (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008) or an inhibition effect, whereby one salient characteristic dominates over the other (Pratto et al., 2006). To investigate these differential effects, we conducted a systematic review on the combined effect of student gender and ethnicity on teacher expectations.

Results provide support for an interplay of gender and ethnicity, rather than a cumulative or dominance effect, on teacher expectation of student academic proficiency and behavior. That is, certain combinations of gender and ethnicity create (dis)advantages for subgroups of students. These results will be discussed in terms of theory and future research as well as their implications.