The psychological mechanisms that subserve inductions about novel social categories in childhood are hotly debated. While research demonstrated that language, and in particular generic statements, plays a major role in how children learn to attribute properties to social categories, developmental theories propose other mechanisms. One theoretical…

The history of the Hilfsschule (special school) is contested and multifaceted. For the German context, most research to date has focused on institutions or professional pioneers in special education. This paper, through a "New Historicism" perspective, asks how a group of pupils, described as "retarded", could become a new…

Teachers' expectations are known to influence students' outcomes. Specifically, better performance is observed among students for whom teachers have high expectations, and vice versa. Teachers not only form their expectations on the basis of previous achievements, but also on the (presumed) group affiliation of students. One group for whom…

Negative stereotypes about intellectually gifted individuals prevail among teachers and in society although empirical research has debunked them. They are also dominant in mass media representations of gifted individuals such as newspaper reports. The present study investigated whether stereotypic representations in newspaper articles contribute…

I draw on ethnographic data from a German school to explore discursive practices of educators that rationalize the illiteracy of 10-year-old, multilingual Ada. I juxtapose various moments of school life that "thickened" Ada's learner identities and find that special needs labeling often rested on pragmatic considerations of resource…