Bases for Teacher Expectations: From the Teacher’s Perspective

Abstract

For more than 40 years, since the publication of Pygmalion in the Classroom (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968), teacher expectation effects have been explored in numerous studies. Teacher expectations are inferences that teachers make about present and future academic achievement and general classroom behaviour of students (Brophy 1998). Teacher expectation effects may occur when teachers form and insist their initial expectations despite contradictory evidence (Brophy 1983), which consequently, lead to changes in student performance and outcomes in accordance with teachers’ initial expectations (Brophy and Good 1974; Jussim 1989; Rubie-Davies 2008a; Weinstein 2002). A vast body of research has investigated teachers’ differential expectations for students (see Dusek and Joseph 1983 for a review). Most studies (e.g. McKown et al. 2010; Speybroeck et al. 2012; Tenenbaum and Ruck 2007) focused on student characteristics, for example student age, ethnicity, and social economic status, which were associated with higher or lower teacher expectations. However, studies about other factors which may influence teachers’ expectations are comparatively fewer. Some researchers (e.g. Babad et al. 1982a; Rubie-Davies 2008a; Weinstein 2002) investigated teachers’ expectation effects from a perspective of teachers, and argued that “the teacher”, instead of “the student”, may play a decisive role in generating teacher expectation effects. Although the individual difference in expectancies between teachers has been identified, what are the characteristics of the different teacher types still remains not fully explored. The current study aimed to examine the variation of teacher expectations depending on teachers’ individual differences in gender, age, working experience, and educational background, which may have some implications for educational practice and teacher professional development.