The question of teacher expectancy effects first arrived on the research scene with the publication of Rosenthal and Jacobson’s Pygmalion in the Classroom (1968) in which they presented their now famous “Oak School" experiment. Their experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that teachers’ expectations for students’ achievement would function as self-fulfilling prophecies; that is, students would begin to perform in a particular way simply because their teachers expected them to.
Most similar studies have indicated that teacher expectancy effects exist when a teacher begins to treat a student consistently as if she were somewhat different from what she actually is. The key factor in inducing this behavior is generally an inflexible attitude towards the capabilities of the student. Even if a teacher correctly perceives the student to be a low achiever, he will be relatively unsuccessful in teaching the student if he expects the abilities of the student to be permanent and unchanging. After analyzing thirty years of research on the subject, Rosenthal2 formulated the four-factor theory of the mediation of expectancy effects.
Climate
Teachers appear to create a warmer socio-emotional climate for their ‘special’ students. This warmth appears to be at least partially communicated by nonverbal cues.
Input (effort)
Teachers appear to teach more material and more difficult material to their ‘special’ students.
Output
Teachers appear to give their ‘special’ students greater opportunities for responding. These opportunities are offered both verbally and nonverbally (e.g. giving a student more time to answer a question).
Feedback
Teachers appear to give their ‘special’ students more informative feedback, both verbal and nonverbal, as to how these students have been performing.
A number of studies show that students are quite perceptive when it comes to detecting the attitudes and expectations of their teachers. Badad1 cites a number of cases that show wide gaps between the teachers’ reports of their differential behavior and their students’ awareness of this behavior. Teachers believe, for instance, that they can conceal from students their special affection to their ‘favorites’, but the data collected from studies refutes this belief. Badad showed groups of students aged 10, 13, and 16 a series of ten-second video clips of teachers talking to and talking about students for whom they had either low or high expectations. Although the student was not generally heard or seen in the clips, all groups of judges detected the student's level and the teacher’s liking for that student in the context-minimal clips. Even the 10-year-old judges were able to tell from a 10 second clip whether the teacher was interacting with a high or low expectancy student. In an extension of this study the same clips were shown to a set of judges in New Zealand who could not understand the Hebrew spoken by the teachers on the video clips. Here also the 10-year-old judges could detect easily the attitude of the teacher after 10 seconds of observing her nonverbal behavior.
Montessori seems to have been aware of this phenomenon and required her teachers to hold their prejudices in check. She wanted them to have positive expectations for every single child, to be unrelentingly watchful for the normalized child to reveal himself. She wanted to teachers to believe that each child had the capacity to become normalized and all that was needed was the correct psychological, social and physical environment.
References
1 Badad R, Taylor P J, Transparency of Teacher Expectancies Across Language, Cultural Boundaries Journal of Educational Research 86:(2) 120-125 Nov-Dec 1992
2 Rosenthal R. Interpersonal Expectancy Effects: A 30 Year Perspective Current Directions in Psychological Science 3(6) 176-179 December 1994