Teacher Expectation and Student Performance

Teacher Expectation and Student Performance Problem Statement—The Counterintuitive Situation A student of a composition class talks to the administrator who in charge listening to these kind of appeals in a school about her failure in the class and believes that her teacher “didn’t like me”. While the administrator looks over the student’s portfolio, she sees improvement on her works and believes that her teacher, who is experienced, should recognize that her work did not match up the “fail” category. When the administrator talks to her teacher, the teacher gives comment on the student’s work and says that it is “shallow”. However, the “shallow” work has no much difference from the work of another student in the teacher’s class who has passed. Therefore, where dose the difference comes from? Proposition Drawing from the previous statement, I propose that teacher’s expectation on students does not necessary come from the student’s performance but usually from the student’s other characteristics and teacher’s previous experience of the student. We can say that teachers have antecedent expectations on different types of students. Analysis Teacher Expectation: The Pygmalion effect The Pygmalion effect refers to the idea that one’s expectations about a person can lead that person to behave and achieve in ways that accord to those expectations (Brehm and Kassin, 1996). Originally from the play “Pygmalion”, author George Bernard Shaw states that “…the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated…”. If one has judgments such as “troublemaker”, “looks smart”, “self-centered” on a person, he/she is forming certain expectations on this person and mostly by his/ her prophecies. This effect especially happens common in the classroom; teachers sometimes tend to judge the performance of students due to incorrect hypothesis, or expectations. Such antecedent expectancy is the essence of self-fulfilling prophecy, which is firstly coined by Robert Merton in 1948. Merton points out that “the self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally dales conception come true. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual courses of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning” (Jones, 1986:42). The Pygmalion effect is explained more thoroughly by Rosenthal and Jacobson in their book “Pygmalion in the Classroom” in 1968. Rosenthal and Jacobson point out that “how one person’s expectation for another person’s behavior can quiet unwittingly become a more accurate prediction simply for its having been made” (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968:Ⅶ). It is argued that in the classroom, teacher’s positive expectation on students leads students to perform well and vise versa. McLeod points out that positive expectations have good effects on students with encouragement and support (McLeod, 1995:370). The concept of self-fulfilling prophecy could apply not only on teacher expectation in the classroom but also in many other daily social contexts. For example, one driver’s expectation of another’s automotive behavior can serve as self-fulfilling prophecy (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968:5). Rosenthal and Jacobson suggest that if we assume that people make prophecies about future events, or hold expectations about them, we may examine a typology of possible relationships existing between prophecies of events as they subsequently happen (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968:7). Rosenthal and Jacobson also find out the problem that teacher’s observations of students’ behavior in the classroom may have been affected by the experimentally created expectations, which means that it is possible for teachers to ascribe more desirable behavior to the special student even if the actual classroom behavior of the special student does not differ from the behavior of the control-group students—it is proved that the teachers’ expectations can color their assessment of students’ performance (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968:98). Attribution Theory and Teacher Expectation Attribution theory is found in relating to teacher expectations on students (Sharma and Tripathi, 1988; McLeod, 1995). Sharma and Tripathi suggest that “attributions by teachers for students’ performance are very effective in changing students’ behavior” (Sharma and Tripathi, 1988:33). They point out that when teachers attribute certain outcome of a selected group of student to their effort; their performance improves in subsequent tests (Sharma and Tripathi, 1988:33). In his book “The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations”, Fritz Heider points out that “attributional process in social perception as essentially similar to those that characteristic inanimate object perception” (Baron and Kassin, 1985:37). Heider believes that every action of a person has a reason and there are three kinds of attribution—situational attribution, personal attribution, and internal attribution. Teacher’s expectation on student can be explained by attribution; it explains achievement behavior in terms of the perceived causes for outcomes (McLeod, 1995:372). This implies that students themselves usually develop a set of beliefs about the reasons for their success or failure. For example, if a fair student gets a good grade on an exam, he/she may attribute his/her good performance on internal (I am good at this subject) or external (I am lucky today) factors. These attributions could be formed by three major factors, according to Berger and Peterson: (1) the student’s past performance, (2) the student’s characteristic, and (3) the effect of the teacher being an actor rather than an observer in teacher-student interaction (McLeod, 1995:372). First, people usually judge one person according to their previous experience of that person; the teachers do the same thing—they predict one student would perform good or bad according to his/her past grades. Therefore, if one student who perform well on a math exam but not doing so well on his/her past math exams, the teacher might attribute his/her performance as luck or cheat. Second, student characteristic also influence teacher attributions. Berger and Peterson point out that teachers tend to attribute the failure of students from lower socio-economic groups to outside factors, such as bad luck, whereas attributing the failure if middle-class students to internal factors, such as lack of ability (McLeod, 1995:372). Other characteristics affect how teachers attribute student performance as well; this will be discussed more in the next section. Lastly, the effect of being actors rather than observers in teacher-student interaction leads teachers to make attributions that are either ego-enhancing or counterdefensive. Therefore, some teachers enhance their own egos by taking credit for student success and blaming students for their own failures whereas other teachers accept responsibility for student failures and give credit to students for their success (McLeod, 1995:373). McLeod also points out that there is a tradition in American education if treating students who are perceived as low achievers as if they were lesser not only in ability but also in character. Here, appears again the important of students’ different characteristics. The Effects of Status Characteristic Generally speaking, the status characteristic theory explains how interactants use differences on specific and diffuse status characteristics to create hierarchical patterns of power, influence, and prestige in task groups (Walker and Simpson, 2000:175). It also explains the relationship between an actor’s standing on status characteristics and the organization of task. Ridgeway and Walker point out that characteristics that carry status value an society, have a powerful impact on a person’s behavior and position in a power and prestige order (Ridgeway and Walker, 1995:292). A status characteristic is an attribute of different individuals which is associated in society with widely held beliefs according greater esteem and worthiness to some states of the attribute than other states of the attribute (Ridgeway and Walker, 1995:292). Hence, status characteristics can explain why teachers make certain antecedent expectations on students. For example, MacLeod (1995) finds out there are two groups of students in a comprehensive high school, which is categorized by students’ ethnicity: one is the “Brothers”, which are mostly composed by white students who are integrated to the school and the other is the “Hallway Hanger”, which is composed mostly by black students who hate school. It is not surprising that the Brothers are expected to perform better than the Hallway Hangers. The Brothers are also encouraged to pursued higher academic achievement while the Hallway Hangers are encouraged to attend occupational schools. Berger et al. state that a status-organizing process is a process by which differences in cognitions and evaluations of individuals, or social types of them, become the basis of difference in the stable and observable features of social interaction. They also point out that these patterned effects of differences in characteristics such as gender, race, and occupation happen in school classroom are all examples of status-organizing process (Berger et al. 1977:3). Gender is another characteristic that usually affect teacher’s expectation on students. For example, teachers tend to expect boys to perform better than girls at most time even in work that is unrelated to gender. As a result, like Ridgeway and Walker point out that “once a status characteristic is salient, its competence associations generalize to affect actor’s expectations about their own and other’s abilities at the specific task at hand” (Ridgeway and Walker, 1995:292). Rosenthal and Jacobson and others argue that many teachers tend to decide one student’s performance in the future when he/she firstly see the student according to his/her status characteristic as well (Fordham and Ogbu, 1986; Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1986). It is not uncommon for a teacher to expect a new first-grader who is white to perform well and one who is black to perform bed. According to the result of Rosenthal and Jacobson’s experiment of the Oak school, it is found that there is a distinction between expectation on female and male students. The female students appear more in the reasoning sphere of intellectual functioning whereas male students appear more in the verbal sphere of intellectual functioning (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968: 81). Conclusion/Suggestion The self-fulfilling prophecy happens not only in school classrooms but also in our daily life social settings. When we are thinking someone should have certain performance according to his/her certain characteristics, we are using our prophecies. Even though we should eliminate our preconception of others, some researchers suggest that the Pygmalion effect does have positive effect on students. For example, in Rosenthal and Jacobson’s Oak School experiment, they prove that if telling students they can perform better than they do now, they actually perform better after a period of time. However, there are others (Hall and Merkal) argue that to treat student differently according to their individual needs is not necessary a bad thing (McLeod, 1995:372). Indeed, since everyone has his/her own individual traits, the best thing we should is not to treat all people alike but to eliminate the negative preconceptions.