The paper reports on the results of a study carried out within the framework of the government-funded large-scale longitudinal evaluation project (NOESIS) launched in 2010 to evaluate the “New Middle School” (NMS), an Austrian school reform program at the lower secondary level. The overall goal of the school reform project is to limit marginalizing processes and improve trajectories for all within an inclusive school setting. In this context, the authors focus on processes involving a specific group of learners considered to be at risk of marginalization, namely, migrant students predominantly from low-income families and ones of a lower education level, and whose first language is not German. In fact, children from ethnic minority groups are part of an ever-widening achievement gap throughout Europe (OECD, 2010).

In this paper, from a four-year longitudinal perspective, we examine the correlation between teachers’ implicit (as opposed to explicit) attitudes and teachers’ verbalized expectations, on the one hand, and students’ achievements, academic aspirations and self-concepts, on the other. Research suggests a link between teachers’ expectations of students’ achievements, and students’ performance in achievement tests. Ethnicity and socioeconomic factors seem to moderate this link (Rubie-Davies, Hattie & Hamilton, 2006). McKnown & Weinstein (2002) found that child ethnicity moderates expectancy effects as early as elementary school and that these effects become more pronounced with age. The older the students, the more they are aware of teacher expectations and the more they demonstrate the expected pattern of less positive and more teacher-congruent self-expectations (Weinstein, Marshall, Sharp & Botkin, 1987).

The present study replicates and expands a study on teachers’ implicit prejudiced attitudes, relations to teacher expectations and the ethnic achievement gap, which revealed that higher teacher bias was correlated with a wider achievement gap between minority and non-minority students (van den Bergh et. al., 2010). We replicate the study in the specific setting of the Austrian NMS school reform, which has the emphatic aim of providing improved academic opportunities for all by reducing marginalization of student groups at risk. We expand the study a) by taking the students’ academic aspirations and self-concepts into consideration, and b) by measuring changes from a longitudinal perspective, specifically upon transition from primary school to NMS (lower secondary) and during the initial three years in the NMS, rather than assessing a static achievement gap at one point in time, as in the initial study.

We ask:

1. To what extent do the biased implicit attitudes of teachers relate to differences in their academic expectations for their immigrant students compared to their non-immigrant students?

2. Over the four-year period, to what extent do the biased implicit attitudes of teachers relate to observed classroom differences in the achievements, academic aspirations and self-concepts of immigrant and non-immigrant students?

3. To what extent does the association between teachers’ biased implicit attitudes and students’ achievements, aspirations and self-concepts appear to be mediated by teacher expectations?

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