The Gender of a Teacher Matters

I was very surprised by some passages in The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Heinrich. Essentially, the more similar a student is to their teacher in terms of gender, ethnicity, and other markers, the more likely one is to learn from them. My prior was that the perceived prestige of the teacher was what mattered, not these other characteristics. This is something I will look into in more detail in the future.

Here are the key parts from the passages:

Recent work by the brain scientist Elizabeth Reynolds Losin, a former student of mine, and her colleagues at UCLA has begun to illuminate the neurological underpinnings of sex-biased cultural learning. Using fMRI technology, Liz focused on the difference between people’s brains when they imitated a same-sex model versus an opposite-sex model. She asked both men and women in Los Angeles to first watch and then imitate the arbitrary hand gestures either of a same-sex or opposite-sex model.…This finding suggests that we experience copying same-sex others as internally more rewarding than copying opposite-sex others. We like it more, so naturally we are inclined to do it more.

And later:

Florian Hoffman and his collaborators unearthed real-world evidence consistent with the experimental findings discussed above: being taught by instructors whom you match on ethnicity/race reduces your dropout rate and raises your grades. In fact, for African-American students at a community college, being taught by an African-American instructor reduced class dropout rates by 6 percentage points and increased the fraction attaining a B or better by 13 percentage points. Similarly, using data from freshman (first-years) at the University of Toronto, Florian’s team has also shown that getting assigned to a same-sex instructor increased students’ grades a bit.