Anatolia Batruch

University of Lausanne | UNIL ·  Institut de psychologie (IP)

Sorting students on the basis of their academic performance into hierarchically ordered curriculums (i.e., between-school tracking) is common practice in various educational systems. International studies show that this form of tracking is associated with increased educational inequalities. As track placement is often based on teacher recommendatio...

Educational institutions are imbued with an institutional meritocratic discourse: only merit counts for academic success. In this article, we study whether this institutional belief has an impact beyond its primary function of encouraging students to study. We propose that belief in school meritocracy has broader societal impact by legitimizing the...

As the topic of inequalities has gained attention in the past decade, social scientists have developed theoretical frameworks to understand how social class shapes the way individuals think, feel, and behave. These frameworks suggest that lower-class contexts nurture psychological and behavioral tendencies oriented toward others and the environment...

Sorting students into hierarchically ordered tracks or streams on the basis of their academic performance (i.e., tracking) is ubiquitous in educational systems, and oftentimes based on teachers’ track recommendations. International surveys indicate that tracking is associated with educational inequalities. To determine if inequalities in tracking m...

Even though the meritocratic ideal is rarely fully attained in educational institutions, students’, teachers’, and parents’ belief that schools are meritocratic engines that maintain the legitimacy of these educational institutions. In this article, we study the belief in school meritocracy beyond the educational context and explore its pernicious...

There is growing evidence in the literature of positive relationships between socio-emotional competencies and school performance. Several hypotheses have been used to explain how these variables may be related to school performance. In this paper, we explored the role of various school adjustment variables in the relationship between interpersonal...

Teachers carry out a number of roles in the educational system. Their primary role is to help all students develop knowledge and skills, but, most of the time, they take on the role of gatekeepers: They evaluate students and exercise selection on the basis of performance. We analyze the roles of teachers through the lens of the literature on social...

L’évaluation n’est pas un exercice neutre qui consiste à quantifier les mérites de la production d’un élève : selon le type d’évaluation utilisée (p.ex., normative ou formative) et selon la fonction qu’on lui attribue (sélectionner ou former), les élèves se sentent plus ou moins menacés, et développent des représentations différentes de leur autono...

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries (N = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower stat...

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries (N = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower stat...

préparation de ce manuscrit a été financée par le Fonds National suisse de la Recherche Scientifique.

The school system is intended to offer all students the same opportunities, but most international surveys reveal an overall lower achievement for students from disadvantaged groups compared with more advantaged students. Recent experimental research in social psychology has demonstrated that schools as institutions contribute with their implicit c...

To understand the persistent social class achievement gap, researchers have investigated how educational settings affect lower vs. higher socio-economic status (SES) students’ performance. We move beyond the question of actual performance to study its assessment by evaluators. We hypothesized that even in the absence of performance differences, ass...

Selection practices in education, such as tracking, may represent a structural obstacle that contributes to the social class achievement gap. We hypothesized that school’s function of selection leads evaluators to reproduce social inequalities in tracking decisions, even when performance is equal. In two studies, participants (students playing the...

This research investigates a barrier faced by low-SES pupils who are on an upward social mobility trajectory: resistance to their high-achiever status. We hypothesize that, as they disconfirm the usual social-class academic disparities (i.e., high-SES on average outperform low-SES pupils), they threaten the status quo and induce restorative reactio...

Educational institutions are considered a keystone for the establishment of a meritocratic society. They supposedly serve two functions: an educational function that promotes learning for all, and a selection function that sorts individuals into different programs, and ultimately social positions, based on individual merit. We study how the functio...