Effect Of City Children Of Migrant Workers Stereotype Threat

Stereotype is a positive or negative attitude, judgment, or feeling about aperson that is generalized from attitudes or beliefs held about the group to which theperson belongs (Jones,1997). And stereotype threat is a situational threat, which canaffect the members of any group about whom a negative stereotype exists (Steele,1997). When negative stereotypes about groups were applied, members of thesegroups could experience the feeling of fear, which would reduce the members’performance. Since Steele and Aronson’s (1995) seminal experiments, researcherspaid more attention to stereotype threat, and the groups with negative stereotypes,which become the main study participants of stereotype threat domain.Migrant children refer to the group of whose parents migrated from rural areasto the cities to work as farmer-workers (He,2009). They are generally the children of6-18who are at the right age to school (Xiong,&Ye,2011). As students, the principalactivities of migrant children are learning in school. Thus teachers have closelycontact with urban migrant children, and also have profound influence on them.What stereotypes teachers held about migrant children? Are these stereotypespositive or negative? Whether the negative stereotypes, especially in the aspect ofstudy, will cause the pressure and fear of migrant children, and affect the behaviorfurther? All of the problems need to be solved in this study.The present research investigated the stereotypes teachers hold about migrantchildren and conducted experiment to explore the stereotype threat effect on them.The first study was to reveal the content of teachers’ stereotype on migrantchildren. By interviewing with teachers, adjective questionnaire formed to investigateteachers, who taught migrant students. The results showed that there were positive,negative and neural stereotypes about migrant children. Particular, stereotypes inaspect of learning teachers held were all negative.In the second experiment, Single Category Implicit Association Test was conductto make sure that such stereotypes collected in the first study were the teachers’ realattitudes toward migrant children. The results showed that the implicit stereotypes were consistent with the explicit ones.The third experiment was to examine the performance of migrant children afterapplying the negative stereotypes. Before the working memory test, migrant childrenwere randomly divided into experimental and control group by introductions. Theresults showed the performance of working memory sharply decreased of migrantchildren in experimental group, comparing those in control group. Stereotype threathampered migrant children’s performance in working memory.There is a stereotype threat effect on migrant children.