Abstract
This study examines the role of teachers' expectations in the association between children's socio-economic background and achievement outcomes. Furthermore, the role of children's ethnicity in moderating this mediated relation is investigated. In the present study, 3,948 children from kindergarten are examined. Data are analysed by means of structural equation modeling. First, results show that teachers' expectations mediate the relation between children's SES and their later language and math achievement, after controlling for children's ethnicity, prior achievement and gender. This result indicates that teachers may exacerbate individual differences between children. Second, children's ethnicity moderates the mediation effect of teachers' expectations with respect to math outcomes. The role of teachers' expectations in mediating the relation between SES and math outcomes is stronger for majority children than for minority children.
Highlights
While interacting with students, teachers develop expectations for students’ academic performance and social skills [1]
An Integrated Model of Teachers’ Expectations In this paper we propose a structural equation modeling approach to examine whether teachers base their expectations on children’s socio-economic background and whether these expectations in turn affect children’s language and math outcomes
The sample was representative for the entire Flemish school population in terms of the applied stratification criteria, the geographic area and the proportion of disadvantaged students targeted by the Act of Equal Opportunities in Education [23]
Summary
Teachers develop expectations for students’ academic performance and social skills [1]. Rosenthal and Jacobson [3] were the first to study the effect of expectations on students’ academic progress in a low-income elementary school. They concluded that students whose teachers expected a high increase of learning ability within the year, had higher intelligence scores at the end of the school year. Because currently no consensus exists about the way students’ social class and ethnicity influence teachers, it would be interesting to examine further whether and how these child characteristics interact in predicting the teachers’ expectations
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