Seminars & Events
SEMINAR: Prof. Dr. Claudia Diehl – On the wrong track? Perceived track mismatch among ethnic minority and majority students in the German educational system
Abstract: We ask why ethnic minority students are more likely than majority students to feel treated unfairly in school. In particular, they believe more often that they should be on a higher educational track than the one they are currently enrolled in. Based on a survey among seventh-graders in Germany, we test two explanations for this “perception gap”. First, minority students may actually be more likely than majority students to be placed in a track that is too low for them (“exposure” to unfair treatment). Second, as students often enrolled in the lowest educational tracks and as children of often highly ambitious parents, minority students may feel a greater need to attribute limited educational success to unfair treatment in order to protect their self-esteem (“ex-post rationalization of failure”). While we find little evidence for the “exposure” mechanism, minority students’ perceptions of being on the wrong track are less closely related to their relative abilities and school performance than are those of majority students. However, most of the “perception gap” between majority and minority students reflects the fact that they are more often enrolled in the lowest tracks of the educational system and that they face high and unmet parental aspirations.
Bio:
Claudia Diehl is a professor of Microsociology at the University of Konstanz and co-speaker of the Cluster of Excellence The Politics of Inequality. Currently she is working on integration processes among new immigrants in Europe and on xenophobia and ethnic discrimination. Prof. dr. Diehl received her PhD from the University of Mannheim in 2001 and was employed at the Federal Institute for Population Research and a professor at the University of Göttingen before her appointment in Konstanz. Her publications include a special issue of Ethnicities on early integration patterns of recent migrants in four European countries, an edited volume on ethnic educational inequality in Germany, and numerous journal articles on migration, integration, ethnic discrimination, and on perceptions of inequality.
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