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Essay on The Effect of Teacher Expectations on Student Achievement
Curriculum and teaching strategies have consistently been revised, updated, and replaced with the promise of higher student achievement. Teachers who have been in the teaching profession longer have gone full cycle in teaching and implementing different curricula, i.e. from phonics, to site based reading, to whole language, and now back to phonics. Professional development in the most up-to-date curriculum and methodologies is an ongoing activity for most teachers. However, regardless of the most scientific, up-to-date, carefully planned curriculum, teacher expectations affect and influence student academic performance.
Teachers' expectations have been found to have a significant impact on student achievement. According to researchers low teacher expectations of minority students results in a self-fulfilling prophecy, contributing to significant achievement gaps between minority and non-minority students (Ferguson, 1998). How do teacher expectations affect student outcomes? Most researchers accept Good and Brophy's (1984) description of the process:
- Early in the school year, teachers form differential expectations for student behavior and achievement.
- Consistent with these differential expectations, teachers behave differently toward various students.
- This treatment tells students something about how they are expected to behave in the classroom and perform on academic tasks.
- If the teacher treatment is consistent over time and if students do not actively resist or change it, it will likely affect their self-concepts, achievement motivation, levels of aspiration, classroom conduct, and interactions with the teacher.
- These effects generally will complement and reinforce the teacher's expectations, so that students will come to conform to these expectations more than they might have otherwise.
- Ultimately, this will affect student achievement and other outcomes. High-expectation students will be led to achieve at or near their potential, but low expectation students will not gain as much as they could have gained if taught differently.................
