Body weight and social status influence grades
Published: Wednesday, Jul 3rd 2024, 14:30
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A study of ninth graders in Germany found that students are subject to grade bias based on their gender, height, ethnicity and the socioeconomic status of their parents. Moreover, these factors add up.
This means that students with multiple "intersectional identities" received significantly lower grades than their peers, regardless of their true abilities. Richard Nennstiel and Sandra Gilgen from the University of Bern and the University of Zurich in Switzerland present these results on Wednesday in the journal "Plos One".
The results of the study are not easily transferable to Switzerland, said Nennstiel at the request of Keystone-SDA. In Switzerland, however, an earlier study showed similar trends for language grades as in the study for Germany for gender, social origin and migration background.
To investigate whether students suffer from bias in their school grades, Nennstiel and Gilgen used data from the National Educational Panel Study in Germany. They focused on a representative sample of 14,090 students who attended ninth grade in 2010.
Nennstiel and Gilgen compared the grades of school teachers with the results of standardized competence tests to find out whether some young people had an advantage over others. The researchers examined the effects of gender, body mass index (BMI), parental socioeconomic status (SES) and ethnic background.
Lower grades due to higher BMI
A gender bias was evident in the grades awarded by teachers in all subjects, with the exception of chemistry. According to the study, girls had an advantage in German, mathematics and biology. Boys benefited in physics. Higher BMIs were associated with significantly lower teacher grades in each subject, while students with higher parental SES had better grades.
A boy with a high BMI from a minority background with a low SES received worse grades on average than a German-born girl with a low BMI from a higher SES, regardless of her actual abilities.
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