Resumen de Teachers’ implicit attitudes, explicit beliefs, and the mediating role of respect and cultural responsibility on mastery and performance-focused instructional practices
Revathy Kumar, Stuart A. Karabenick, Jacob N. Burgoon
The theory of planned behavior and the dual process attitude-to-behavior MODE model framed an examination of how White teachers’ (N = 241) implicit and explicit attitudes toward White versus non-White students were related to their classroom instructional practices in 2 school districts with a high percentage of Arab American and Chaldean American (ArChal) students. We proposed a model in which the relations would be mediated by teachers’ desire to promote respect in the classroom and to take responsibility for providing a culturally responsive curriculum and resolving interethnic conflicts. The Implicit Association Test assessed teachers’ implicit preference for White relative to ArChal adolescents, and explicit measures assessed teachers’ negative stereotypic beliefs regarding minority and poor adolescents. Path analysis indicated that teachers’ explicit and implicit attitudes, mediated by their desire to promote respect and by their personal sense of responsibility for engaging in culturally responsive teaching, explained 30% and 13% of the variance in teachers’ endorsement of mastery- and performance-focused instructional practices, respectively. Teachers who held more implicitly favorable attitudes toward White relative to ArChal adolescents were less likely to promote mutual respect among students and were consequently less responsible for engaging in culturally adaptive practices and for resolving interethnic conflict among students. Explicit negative belief regarding minority and poor students was directly related to endorsing performance-focused instructional practices. Results imply the need to provide teachers the opportunities to reflect and deliberate on their attitudes and understand the links among implicit attitudes, explicit beliefs, and classroom instruction.
