Author ORCID Identifier
Rachel E. Fish: 0000-0002-5720-021X
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-1-2021
Publication Title
Social Science Research
Abstract
While schools are thought to use meritocratic criteria when evaluating students, research indicates that teachers hold lower expectations for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, it is unclear what the unique impact is of specific student traits on teacher expectations, as different traits are often correlated to one another in real life. Moreover, research has neglected the role of the institutional context, yet tracking procedures, financial barriers to education, and institutionalized cultural beliefs may influence how teachers form expectations. We conducted a factorial survey experiment in three contexts that vary with respect to these institutional characteristics (The United States, New York City; Norway, Oslo; the Netherlands, Amsterdam). We asked elementary school teachers to express expectations for hypothetical students whose characteristics were experimentally manipulated. Teachers in the different contexts used the same student traits when forming expectations, yet varied in the importance they attached to these traits. In Amsterdam – where teachers track students on the basis of their performance and tracking bears significant consequences for educational careers – we found a large impact of student performance. In Oslo – where institutions show an explicit commitment to equality of educational opportunity – teachers based their expectations less on student effort, and seemed to make more inferences about student performance by a student's socio-economic background. New York teachers seemed to make few inferences about student performance based on their socio-economic background.
Keywords
Ability tracking, Educational institutions, Evaluative processes, Factorial survey experiment, Teacher expectations
Volume
100
DOI
10.1016/j.ssresearch.2021.102599
ISSN
0049089X
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Geven, Sara; Wiborg, Øyvind N.; Fish, Rachel E.; and van de Werfhorst, Herman G., "How Teachers Form Educational Expectations for Students: a Comparative Factorial Survey Experiment in Three Institutional Contexts" (2021). Education and Child Study: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/edc_facpubs/31
Comments
Archived as published.