Pre-service teachers' explicit and implicit stereotypes towards pupils with different special educational needs.

Abstract

Background: Successful inclusion in education depends heavily on the attitudes of teachers, and stereotypes play a significant role in shaping these attitudes. However, social desirability bias may limit direct measures of stereotypes. Combining direct and indirect measures offers better insights. But studies on SEN-specific stereotypes combining these measures are rare.

Aims: This study aims to investigate and compare pre-service teachers' explicit and implicit stereotypes towards autistic pupils, pupils with Down syndrome, and pupils with dyslexia using direct and indirect measures.

Sample: Our sample consisted of N = 76 German pre-service teachers with an average age of 22.75 years (SD = 3.32), of which 61% identified as female.

Methods: We assessed explicit stereotypes via a questionnaire and implicit stereotypes using lexical decision tasks. To compare explicit and implicit stereotypes, we computed Kendall's tau correlation coefficients.

Results: Participants rated stereotypical adjectives significantly above the neutral midpoint for all three groups. They responded significantly faster to stereotypical than to non-stereotypical words in the lexical decision tasks, with large effect sizes for explicit ratings and medium effect sizes for implicit measures. Explicit and implicit stereotypes did not correlate significantly with one another.

Conclusion: The study found that pre-service teachers clearly endorsed explicit stereotypes and showed implicit associations in line with these stereotypes, especially towards autistic pupils and those with Down syndrome, while patterns for dyslexia were less pronounced. These results underline how common such stereotypes are in educational contexts and suggest that interventions should address both explicit and implicit bias.