The Effects of Teachers' Attitudes towards Migrant Students on Their Academic Achievements

Presenter

Xinyi Chen (University of Glasgow)

Abstract

Urban schools in developing countries face the challenges of accepting students from internal migrant families that mostly move from the countryside to cities and providing equal opportunities for them. Similar issues used to be widely experienced by educational systems in developed countries but has been less investigated in the literature. In a school setting, teachers play a crucial role in organising classes, delivering knowledge, providing feedback and emotional supports through day-to-day contacts with migrant children. Teachers’ attitudes, if biased by their subjective impressions, affections or past experiences, may exaggerate the disadvantaged situations of migrant students. This study analyses the effects of having teachers holding different attitudes towards internal migrant students about their academic ability relative to local students on students’ test scores. By making use of the random assignment of students to teachers, this study finds that having teachers with positive attitudes towards migrant students could improve their test scores. And there is no harmful effect for local students. The positive effects are driven by improvement in the non-cognitive skills of migrant students, teachers’ behaviours in favour of them and supportive responses of parents according to teachers’ perceptions. This study contributes to the limited literature on understanding the situations of internal migrant children in local schools by proving that teachers’ attitudes and behaviours are a potential source leading to the local-migrant achievement gap. Additionally, this study also adds to the growing body of literature on the effects of teachers’ attitudes on achievement gaps across various population groups by focusing on a student group at risk of stereotyping due to their families' socioeconomic background. Furthermore, this study reveals that teachers’ attitudes towards students could trigger family-wide behavioural reactions and thus contribute to the literature on determinants of household investments.