The study examined three hypotheses concerning the role that (a) EMR-class label, (b) teacher's dogmatism, and (c) pessimistic stereotype about an EMR-class student play in the judgment of a student's writings. Finnish special education teachers (N=135) rated five sentences written by an 11-year-old student. The teachers were randomly assigned to one of 2 groups. Half were told that the writer was a student in an EMR-class; the other half (control group) were only informed that the writer was a middle school student. Results indicated that (1) the EMR-class label diminished teachers' ratings, (2) dogmatism and pessimistic stereotype correlated negatively with ratings, and (3) that dogmatism and pessimistic stereotyping specified the effect of label. Dogmatism and pessimistic stereotype were independent of each other; the higher they were, the higher was the effect of label. The findings suggest that both the structure and the content of a teacher's beliefs may play a significant role in information processing and stereotyping used in special education.
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