What Teachers Expect: The Relationship between Student Learning Behaviour and Teacher Expectation

Abstract

Teachers play an essential role in any education system and are an important factor that has a bearing on student success. Teachers’ anticipation and commitment in the field of teaching and learning are but a significant component of the teacher’s performance in general. This study seeks to offer ways to improve students learning behaviour in the Aowin Municipality by considering the relationship between teachers’ expectations and students’ learning behaviour in the Ghanaian context. A Correlational research design was employed for the study. Using the Krejcie and Morgan table of sample size, a sample of 225 comprising 205 students and 20 teachers from 19 Junior High Schools in the Aowin Municipality was selected for the study. A multi-stage sampling method is adopted and used for conducting the study. An adapted Teacher Expectations questionnaire by Gallahar, with a reliability coefficient of 0.87 was used for the study. It was found that the relationship between teacher expectation (independent variable) and students’ behaviour (dependent variable), though not statistically significant (r (215) = -.204, p = .403), it was concluded that what teachers expect of their students may have some form of influence on the learning behaviours of students. It is therefore recommended that the school authorities should regulate the kind of expectations teachers give their students. For instance, the head teacher can have the general expectations for the school as well as specific classroom expectations by the individual class teachers. This can be read or pasted to keep reminding the students of what is expected of them