Exploring teacher trust in technical/vocational secondary schools: Male teachers' preference for girls

This article explores whether teachers' trust in pupils in technical/vocational schools is associated with teachers' and pupils' gender. As for the teachers, besides gender, age, socioeconomic origin, and subject taught are considered and, as for the pupils, the gender composition of the school (proportion of girls at school), the socioeconomic context of the school and the grades teachers instruct. Multilevel analyses of data of 391 teachers in a sample of 11) technical/vocational schools demonstrate that initially none of the teacher features relates to teacher trust. Adding gender composition to the model yields an effect of teachers' gender: Female teachers have less trust in their pupils than male teachers have. Also, teachers' trust increases with the proportion of girls at school. Finally, a significant interaction effect indicates that male teachers seem to prefer female pupils. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.