Teachers' cognitive load and track recommendations

2023-01-24

2023-03-24

Teachers' hypothetical track recommendations and reported characteristics of the students' profiles.

The description of the design is under the "Experimental Design (Hidden)" field.

We will recruit a sample of Italian middle school teachers and will ask them to complete an online questionnaire to understand more about how they assign the track recommendations to their 8th-grade students. As part of the questionnaire, they will be asked to assign the high school track recommendations to a series of hypothetical students, after observing the students' profiles describing their academic ability and their interests.

We will randomly vary both the gender in each student profile as well as the teachers' memory capacity. In particular, teachers will be randomized into 3 groups:
(1) Group "Baseline" (complete memory): Teachers in the baseline condition will first observe the series of hypothetical students' profiles. On the next page, they can review the profiles that they just observed; with the profiles in front of them, they will be asked to report the characteristics of each student and to assign track recommendations.
(2) Group "Memory" (free recall of profiles): Teachers will first observe the series of hypothetical students' profiles. On the next page, they will be asked to recall the characteristics of each student and to assign the track recommendations.
(3) Group "Memory + Cognitive Load" (free recall + more difficult to recall): teachers will be asked to memorize the names of 4 middle schools and to rehearse them until they will be asked to write them down. Then, they will observe the series of hypothetical students' profiles. Last, they will be asked to write down the names of the 4 middle schools, recall the characteristics of each student, and assign the track recommendations. The additional task to memorize the names of the 4 middle schools and keep them in mind should reduce teachers' cognitive resources on the "main task", without having a direct effect on recommendations.

We hypothesize that:
(1) When teachers evaluate a girl rather than a boy with identical characteristics and have limited cognitive capacity (they are assigned to groups 2 or 3 rather than 1), they are more likely to recommend the girl to a female-typed track.
(2) The proposed mechanism is that when teachers have limited cognitive capacity, it is more difficult for them to remember the characteristics of the individual students and they fall back on their gender default (prior). Moreover, they may selectively recall a biased set of signals about the students. Both limited and selective memory of signals would increase gender discrimination.

To test hypotheses 1 and 2, we will run the following analyses:
(1) we will pool all the student profiles and run regressions at the student profile by teacher level, with student profiles fixed effects. We will test whether a student is more likely to be recommended to a female-typed track if she is female and the teacher has limited cognitive capacity.
(2) To test if limited cognitive capacity leads to higher discrimination through limited and selective memory, we will run another series of regressions at the student profile by teacher level, testing if the gender gap in recalled math and literature grades and the gender gap in recalled students' characteristics increases when teachers have limited cognitive capacity.
We will run the analysis for all teachers, and separately for female and male teachers.

The classification of school tracks in female-typed and male-typed is data-driven: female-typed tracks are those disproportionately recommended to girls, while male-typed tracks are those disproportionately recommended to boys.

Randomization done in office by a computer.

Teachers.

No

Around 500 teachers.

Around 500 teachers.

Equal numbers of teachers in each treatment arm.