ABSTRACT

It is generally accepted within education circles that teacher expectations have effects on student achievement. Much early research in this area concentrated on ways teachers interacted with students for whom they had correspondingly high or low expectations (Brophy 1982, 1983, 1985; Cooper and Good 1983). Several differentiating behaviours were identified. For example, teachers praised students for whom they held high expectations (high expectation students) more frequently than those for whom they had low expectations (low expectation students), and they criticized low expectation students far more often; allowed more wait time for high expectation students; and interacted with high expectation students in public and low expectation students in private (Brophy 1985; Cooper and Good 1983; Harris and Rosenthal 1985). It was argued that these differential behaviours provided students with messages about what was expected of them and that, over time, they began to perform in accordance with the teachers’ expectations.