Teachers' Expectations for Students Matter. Here's a Key Element Many Miss

Teachers’ expectations can have a profound effect on their students’ motivation and academic achievement, a finding long known in education research. But new evidence suggests that without details on how students can improve, teacher feedback may backfire for historically disadvantaged students.

Teachers asked to stress their high expectations—and their belief that students could meet them—gave their students more specific math feedback than teachers who commented without a specific focus on expectations, according to a forthcoming study in the peer-reviewed journal Educational Researcher.

But few of the teachers in the study gave students specific guidance on how to improve, the study found, and girls and students of color were more likely to receive negative feedback related to their ability, which could reduce students’ belief that they could hone their math skills over time.

“It’s good that when we tell teachers to have high standards, it prompts them to be more specific. ... But at the same time, we found teachers are not really providing detailed feedback about students’ strategies and performance,” said Yasemin Copur-Gencturk, the study author and a professor of teacher education at the University of Southern California. “That tells us that kids are leaving the classroom knowing, ‘OK, I’m stuck, but I don’t know where I am stuck or how to overcome that struggle.’”

More than a half century of research links high teacher expectations to students’ successful academic performance, a self-fulfilling prophecy known as the “Pygmalion effect

” after the sculptor in Greek mythology who brought his creation to life. Prior studies have found teacher expectations can be a better predictor of student graduation rates

, for example, than student motivation or effort.

Students also have been shown to perform better when teachers couch guidance in the context of helping students meet high expectations—what University of Texas at Austin researcher David Yeager has called “wise feedback

.”

As part of a larger, ongoing series of studies on teacher feedback to students, Copur-Gencturk and her colleagues recorded middle school students of different genders and racial backgrounds talking about math problems, which had been taken from incorrect and partially correct answers from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 8th grade math. The researchers randomly assigned nearly 1,000 math teachers to analyze and give feedback to the students based on the videos. They were directed to either provide their normal comments or feedback focused on standards and expectations.

They gauged how well the educators conveyed their expectations and belief in their students, but also whether the teachers focused on students’ efforts, or on their inherent ability. Focusing on ability has been previously linked to students feeling less capable of improving their math skills through effort.

Black and white girls were more likely to receive negative comments about their math ability and effort from the teachers in the sample who had been directed to convey high expectations. In fact, for all student groups except white boys, teachers were more likely to convey high expectations by telling students that they weren’t trying hard enough—considered less effective feedback without providing specific examples and strategies to improve.

Those findings mirror teacher biases Copur-Genturk and colleagues found in a related study in the same project

. When reviewing incorrect math problems, teachers in the earlier study tended to rate boys as having higher math ability than girls on the same problem, even though they did not perceive differences in boys’ and girls’ effort or correct answers. Teachers who reported believing that gaps between men and women no longer exist in society were most likely to underestimate girls’ math ability.

Boosting instructional guidance to succeed

In the current study, researchers also assessed whether teachers’ feedback accurately gauged students’ work, noted strengths and weaknesses, and provided specific ways that students could improve.

Teachers who had been asked to focus on high expectations were 13 percentage points more likely to discuss students’ strengths and weaknesses, at nearly 39%. Only 26% of teachers commenting as usual did that.

But only about 1 in 10 of either “high expectations” teachers or those in the control group gave their students suggestions targeted to fix the misconception or strategy that led to the problem in their math work, regardless of other comments they made on students’ abilities or effort.

While much professional development focuses on improving teachers’ content knowledge, Copur-Gencturk said teachers often get fewer opportunities to practice giving content-related feedback to students.

“When a student explains their strategy, I can say that, ‘OK, this is very interesting,’ but if I want go beyond a correct answer [versus] an incorrect answer, what makes something correct in relation to the standard I’m teaching requires a much higher level of pedagogical expertise,” she said. “That is something unfortunately less common across teachers. It’s not an easy expertise.”