What is it about?
We wanted to know whether social-class disparities in students' preschool participation were related to teachers' behaviors. We observed almost 8,000 participation attempts from children during classroom discussions and coded how their teachers responded. Overall, regardless of whether they played by the rules by raising their hands or broke the rules by calling out, students were less likely to have their participation attempts accepted if they came from a working-class background.
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Why is it important?
This research shows that social-class differences in preschool participation are not simply a result of inherent deficits in the students and their families. Rather, teachers play an important gatekeeping role, deciding who can and can't participate. Without addressing these biases, preschools risk making existing inequalities even more pronounced.
Perspectives
A huge amount of video coding went into the production of this article as we wanted to be sure to capture different types of participation and their eventual outcomes. No one ever wants to believe that they are biased, but I hope our findings make educators, institutions, and policymakers think about how these biases could influence their own practice and begin to address them.
Lewis Doyle
University of Surrey
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Preschool teachers provide fewer participation opportunities to working-class students than those from more privileged backgrounds, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2515833122.
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