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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1347749
This article is part of the Research Topic Intercultural Communication and International Students View all 5 articles

Supportive Teachers, Active Students: Is Teacher Support a Promising Key to Engaging Students With and Without Migration Backgrounds?

Provisionally accepted
Simon Munk Simon Munk 1*Doris Holzberger Doris Holzberger 1Ricardo Böheim Ricardo Böheim 2Tina Seidel Tina Seidel 2
  • 1 Technical University of Munich, Center for International Student Assessment (ZIB) e.V., TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, Germany, Munich, Germany
  • 2 Technical University of Munich, Friedl Schöller Endowed Chair for Educational Psychology, TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, Germany, Munich, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Students with and without migration backgrounds differ in terms of their achievement. One approach to reducing the gap between the two groups may be through equal participation in classroom discourse. Here, supportive teaching behavior can be particularly important for promoting student participation. Especially teacher support after a student has made a mistake, the so-called error culture in the classroom, could pave the way for students to become active participants. In this study, we analyzed whether error culture as a facet of teacher support could be a promising key to engaging students with and without migration backgrounds. To investigate the generalizability of the process across different subjects, we examined video data from 20 eighth-grade classrooms of academic-track secondary schools in both German Language Arts and Mathematics (N = 387 students). The results from nested hierarchical linear models indicate that error culture is related to student participation in German Language Arts but not in Mathematics. Interestingly, students with and without migration backgrounds did not differ in terms of their participation in classroom discourse. Furthermore, teachers' positive error culture supported students' participation irrespective of their migration background. Therefore, we encourage teachers to continue to pay attention to their error culture as this seems relevant for all students in the classroom.

    Keywords: Migration background, teacher support, Error culture, Participation, engagement

    Received: 01 Dec 2023; Accepted: 26 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Munk, Holzberger, Böheim and Seidel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Simon Munk, Technical University of Munich, Center for International Student Assessment (ZIB) e.V., TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, Germany, Munich, Germany

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