Article
Учительские ожидания и академические достижения учащихся: обзор зарубежных исследований
The “teacher-student” relationship plays a particular role in the learning and therefore it has long been in the focus of the attention of many researchers and practitioners. The pattern of the “teacher-student” relationship varies from the individual characteristics of the participants in the process, one of whom is a teacher. One of the teacher characteristics is teacher expectations. The purpose of this paper is a review of the existing literature on the topic of teachers' expectations and finding the poorly investigated area in this topic. The results of the review show firstly that teachers form their expectations based on the student's academic achievements and behavior in school as well as their own beliefs. Secondly, teachers may translate their expectations to students through their behavior, and students can react to this behavior, so it can lead to the emergence of the phenomenon of “self-fulfilling” prophecy. Thus, teacher's expectations can either positively or negatively affect students' academic achievements. Finally, despite that teachers' expectations have been studied for a long time, there are still poorly studied areas, for instance, the study of the stability of teachers' expectations is one of the new areas of research.
The paper focuses on how accurate teachers may or may not be in gauging their class’academic abilities. We use a sample of classrooms in three Russian regions to identify sources of mathematics and Russian teachers’ inaccuracies in predicting their high school classes’ scores on Russian and mathematics high stakes college entrance tests (the Unified State Exam, or USE). We test the hypothesis that teachers’ perceptions of their relationship with their classes are good predictors of such inaccuracies. This is important because teachers often focus on their relationship with the class as an end in itself or as a means to engaging students. Good teacher–student relations may indeed result in more students’ learning, but perhaps not nearly as much as teachers believe. We find that both Russian and mathematics teachers make inaccurate predictions of their class’ high stakes examination results based on how they perceive their relationship with their class. Teachers who believe they have a very good relationship with the class significantly overestimate their class’ performance on the USE, and those who perceive a poor relationship, underestimate their class’ performance, although this underestimate is generally not statistically significant.
Background: Previous research shows that incorrect teacher expectations about students can affect students’ academic success. Moreover, students’ ethnicity was found to be one of the most influential characteristics affecting teacher expectations, which can be based on ethnic stereotypes. Most studies test this relationship by comparing teacher expectations of multiple ethnic groups; however, we propose here another perspective, assuming that the connection between ethnic stereotypes and expectations may be determined by the content of the stereotypes.
Objective: This study examines the influence of students’ ethnicity on teacher expectations and stereotypes, as well as the relationship of teacher expectations and stereotypes toward ethnic minority students, by including the stereotype content model in the analysis.
Design: Thirty-four primary school teachers participated in the experiment in which they analyzed six fictional profiles of students, two of which were experimental. The experimental profiles contained identical information (annual school grade, a teacher testimonial, gender), but differed in names of the students and their parents, and in their migration background. Thus, we manipulated only the information related to ethnicity and migration history of two students.
Results: Teacher expectations about the performance of minority students were always unfavorable compared with expectations about the performance of the majority students, but their expectations about the abilities of minority and majority students, which include teachers’ beliefs about students’ educational skills, attitudes and motivation, and capacity for school work, were mixed. We also discovered that the teacher expectations were positively related to perceptions of competence and not to perceptions of warmth. However, the minority student was evaluated by teachers as just as warm and competent as the majority.
Conclusion: This study shows the relevance of the problem of correct expectations of teachers toward students with different ethnic backgrounds. In contrast to the teachers’ perceptions of the warmth and competence of students, information about the ethnicity of the child influences their expectations. Meanwhile the teachers’ expectations are differently related to the various components of their stereotypes. The results raise a question about the definition and operationalization of teachers’ expectations.
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.