Department of International Business Administration, University of Applied Sciences Worms, Worms, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy.
PLoS One. 2021 Feb 8;16(2):e0245972. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245972. eCollection 2021.
Discrimination and prejudice against overweight people is common in Western societies. In this article we aim to understand whether these attitudes reverberate into the school setting, by investigating whether teachers grade overweight students more severely than comparable normal weight students. By relying on the Attribution-Value Model of Prejudice (AVMP) and previous studies, we test a series of hypotheses using data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS SC3) on a sample of students enrolled in the 7th grade (lower secondary education). We used hierarchical ordered logit regression to assess whether overweight and obese students receive systematically lower grades by their teachers in German and mathematics, adjusting for subject-specific competences measured with a standardized test, and a rich set of socio-demographic and socio-psychological students' characteristics (e.g. the "big five"). Results suggested that overweight and obese students were more severely graded in both subjects. The penalty for overweight students, and especially for obese students, was slightly larger in German and in the lowest part of the grade distribution. There was also indication of heterogeneous penalties by gender, with overweight male students being especially penalized in math. Possible ways to help teachers in assigning grades in a fairer way are discussed at the end.
在西方社会，人们普遍存在对超重人群的歧视和偏见。在本文中，我们旨在探讨这些态度是否会在学校环境中产生回响，研究教师是否会对超重学生给予比正常体重学生更严厉的评分。我们依托偏见归因-价值模型（AVMP）和先前的研究，利用德国国家教育面板研究（NEPS SC3）在 7 年级（初中）学生样本中收集的数据，通过一系列假设检验来验证我们的观点。我们使用分层有序逻辑回归来评估超重和肥胖学生在德语和数学这两门学科中是否会受到教师的系统性低分评价，回归控制了标准化考试中测量的特定学科能力，以及一系列丰富的社会人口学和社会心理学学生特征（例如“大五”）。结果表明，超重和肥胖学生在这两门学科中都会受到更严厉的评分。超重学生，尤其是肥胖学生，在德语和成绩分布最低部分的评分中受到的惩罚更大。此外，性别也存在不同的惩罚方式，超重的男学生在数学中受到的惩罚尤其大。最后，我们讨论了帮助教师更公平地评分的可能方法。
