Why stereotypes hinder learning

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Sarah Hofer knows she is fighting a hydra. In her research, the psychologist reveals how social stereotypes alter and negatively influence the self-concept and educational performance of children. Not only are these stereotypes entrenched in the heads of parents and teachers, but they are also commercially exploited and reinforced – such as when children’s toys and clothing are segregated by color: blue for boys and pink for girls. Most toys related to building and technology are decked out in boy’s colors, while everything to do with animals and dolls is bright pink.

This serves the prevailing stereotype, according to which interest in technology and scientific aptitude are determined by gender. Hofer knows this is not the case: “There’s no biological reason at all why girls should be less suited to STEM subjects than boys.” This has also been demonstrated by studies such as the paper by French neuroscientist Pauline Martinot which appeared in Nature in 2025: At kindergarten age, children exhibit no differences in mathematical and scientific ability according to gender. Only when they get to school do the grades of boys in mathematics become better on average than those of girls.

As a consequence, significantly fewer women than men study so-called STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In computer science, for example, only 23 percent of first semester students in 2024 were female, and the trend is downward according to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany.

“It can’t be that women are inherently not interested in these subjects„ especially as technology has such broad societal relevance,” observes Hofer, noting that boys are equally exposed to stereotypes that influence their educational and life paths. “Just as girls are disadvantaged in the natural sciences, so it goes for boys in all social professions.” There is a lack here of male educators in schools and kindergartens. “It would benefit boys and the whole social dynamics in educational institutions if there were male and female professionals working there. Stereotypes and how they work have consequences that are not exactly good for anyone, nor for society as a whole.”

When stereotypes begin to take hold

Yet people start out their lives bristling with confidence: “Small children think they can do everything well. Unfortunately, this changes in the course of their schooling, including through the feedback that pupils receive. On top of this, there are the comparisons with others and between their own abilities in various subjects. We think this is an important moment at which stereotypes begin to take hold,” says Hofer. The Professor of Teaching and Learning Research at the Chair of Empirical Pedagogy & Educational Psychology at LMU wants to reconstruct the moment at which the self-concept of children differentiates. This includes their notions of what they are good at, and what they are not.

In a study carried out with Silke Bodenberger, Hofer developed a tool which allows her to investigate the interests and self-concept of children from pre-school to fourth grade in the German primary school system. While answering a questionnaire with fun elements on a tablet computer, children indicate which activities they are interested in, and which they think they are capable of doing. “We want to find out whether – and if so, when – the two diverge and whether we find differences here according to gender or, say, social background.”

When children do not believe in themselves

After all, it is not only gender stereotypes that negatively affect performance. Common conceptions about socioeconomic status, and the effect this has on educational paths, also influence the learning behavior of children. Hofer demonstrated this in a study drawing on data from the Pisa assessment of student performance. She investigated different variables of self-perception – for example, what assumptions children have about their scholarly abilities and what attitude they have regarding the extent to which they can change their abilities. She also recorded their fear of failure. Her findings revealed that children from families with low socioeconomic status had less belief in themselves and their learning success. They evidently internalized low expectations on account of their background.

“Self-perception is a very important factor determining achievement. We see in our study that it has a negative impact on performance in children from families with low socioeconomic status,” says Hofer and explains: “Stereotypes are reflected in how people see themselves. The theories we have about ourselves are influenced by the culture and the stereotypes that prevail there. This applies to the supposed relationship between gender and mathematical and scientific ability just as it does to conceptions of how socioeconomic status is related to school performance and subsequently a possible academic career.”

How stereotypes work

Stereotypes can affect people’s behavior and play a negative role in exam situations. “Stereotypes can influence which situations children seek out and which they avoid, what they explore in more depth, and ultimately what their interests become,” notes Hofer.

In addition, they can trigger stress and anxiety in exam situations. “People convince themselves they will probably do poorly in exams and suffer from anxiety. This goes on to affect their actual performance. Grappling with stereotypes ties up so many resources that less of them are available to perform the tasks at hand.”

This causes a certain self-image to solidify over time, and the children get caught in a vicious circle. Sarah Hofer describes the process as follows: “When it comes to math, say, a child thinks that the prospects of doing well do not warrant the effort of studying. They assign low value to studying math on the assumption that the subject is “not for me.” And in any case, nobody is expecting good grades from them. Once children come to this conclusion, they’re no longer motivated to engage with the subject and do not seek out new situations in which they could improve their skills. If they experience failure as a result, this confirms their lower perceived self-efficacy. It’s very difficult to break out of this cycle.”

Help could come in the form of so-called adaptive teaching approaches, possibly supported by the use of digital learning systems, whereby children receive direct individual feedback about their performance. The focus is on development potential as opposed to what students cannot do, building positive experiences of their abilities across all subjects. “If students could see where they stand, and what they can already do, this would help nip in the bud the motivation problems that can arise due to stereotypes. Similarly, we managed to demonstrate, for example, that task difficulties adapted to the proficiency of students in mathematics promote learning particularly in children with lower prior knowledge and less interest in the subject. Such tasks allow children to experience competence instead of failing at tasks that are too difficult for them – or being bored at tasks that are too easy for them.”

Even teachers sometimes grade based on stereotypes

Hofer also investigates how stereotypes affect the work of teachers. In a study, she demonstrated how this can lead to bias in grading: The same physics exercise with the same solution was distributed to practicing teachers and students studying to become teachers, along with the request to grade the answer. Some of the papers had indications that they were completed by a girl, while others had indications they were done by a boy. “In particular, teachers with little experience gave significantly lower grades to the solution that supposedly came from a girl. With increasing teacher experience, the effect became less pronounced. Perhaps this is because teachers become more adept at grading exercises with experience, or it could be because experience overrides the stereotype,” speculates Hofer.

The psychologist does not want this to be understood as a criticism of young teachers. “It’s a general rule that people reach for heuristics in situations where they are overtaxed. This is a mechanism of the cognitive architecture and information processing of the brain, which people need to a certain extent because they have to take in and filter so much information every second. Heuristics allow people to make faster decisions. In the study, the solution to the physics exercise was not easy to grade, as it contained both correct and incorrect elements. It was presumably this difficulty that unconsciously triggered the stereotype as a sort of heuristic, such that the information about gender and the corresponding conclusions leaked into the grading.”

Sample solutions could help avoid such situations and distorted grading, especially ones with clear instructions and solution templates showing how to grade the answer. This can reduce the extent to which teachers are overtaxed in a grading situation – and thus stop them reaching for a stereotype.

Hofer’s study investigated the problem using the example of physics and gender stereotypes, but assumptions and evaluations based on stereotypes can affect all subjects and different groups of people. There are studies, for example, which show that boys are graded lower when it comes to correcting German essays.

Making no distinctions

So that children do not get caught in such a vicious circle in the first place, and are not made to feel incompetent in certain domains, we need to pull together to uproot the socially embedded stereotypes.

The implementation of adaptive teaching in schools, with or without digital technologies, in order to support children at all skill levels, is one thing. Hofer also cites as a positive example pedagogical projects whereby mentors are given to children as role models for stereotype-atypical careers from an early age. “Naturally, you need the corresponding social environment, but you can achieve quite a lot with these interventions that act on children’s experience of competence and their self-image.”

The children’s families and role models in the sphere of education and leisure could take care “not to make any distinctions between, say, boys and girls when proposing activities.” Hofer also recommends being sensitive to the indirect messages that adults continuously, and often unconsciously, transmit in communication with children.

“Of course, people are interested in different things,” says Hofer. “But stereotypes should not limit children, dictating what they should be interested in, or what they can and can’t do, such that whole groups of people never delve into certain areas or subjects due to their social background or their gender. Rather, every child should have the opportunity to try out all kinds of different things according to their individual and changing interests, inclinations, and abilities, so that they can discover what they’re good at and what they like – free from stereotypes.”

Profile:

Sarah I. Hofer has been Professor of Teaching and Learning Research at LMU since April 2022.

More about Sarah Hofer’s research:

Project: Self-Perceptions and Social Disparities in Education

Publications mentioned in text:

Sarah I. Hofer u.a.: Self-perceptions as mechanisms of achievement inequality: evidence across 70 countries. In: npj Science of Learning 2024

Sarah I. Hofer, Frank Reinhold: Scaffolding of learning activities: Aptitude-treatment-interaction effects in math? In: Learning and Instruction 2025

Sarah I. Hofer: Studying Gender Bias in Physics Grading: The role of teaching experience and country. In: International Journal of Science Education 2015

Further study on the topic:

P. Martinot et al.: Rapid emergence of maths gender gap in first grade. In: Nature 2025