Principle 11: What You Think About Me Influences My Performance and Your Expectations

Principle 11. Teacher expectations

Teachers’ expectations about their students affect students’ opportunities to learn, their motivation and their learning outcomes.

"The beliefs that teachers have about their students affect students’ opportunities to learn, their motivation and their learning outcomes. Psychological research has uncovered ways for teachers to communicate high expectations for all students and avoid creating negative self-fulfilling prophecies." Using the 'Top 20 Principles': These psychological principles will help your students learn more effectively

Principle 11 addresses the link between a teacher's expectation of a student and how that impacts the student's motivation and perception of performance. These expectations can be positive or negative. The "Hawthorne effect" is an experiment done in the 1920's and 1930's which illustrate the how people will perform more effectively when they know they are being watched. In this experiment, workers were evaluated on their productivity based on changing the lights in an electric company. However, it was noted that any increases in performance subsided after the experiment was over. It was realized it wasn't the lights that impacted performance but rather than employees were being watched.

A similar impact occurs when instructors have high expectations of students, and they then perform better. These expectations have to be explicit, and matched with appropriate feedback. Additionally, learning objectives and desired responses have to match. Finally, a high level of support must accompany the expectations to help students master difficult concepts and a "growth mindset", with the idea that any student can learn the materials, needs to be prevalent.

Furthermore, studies have shown that the evaluation process can also be influenced by a "halo" effect where the first evaluation can influence how an instructor perceives later work:

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman relates how the halo effect led him to systematically mis-grade students’ essays. Quite reasonably, if a students’ first essay was awarded a high score, mistakes in later essays were ignored or excused. But Kahneman noticed problem:

If a student had written two essays, one strong one weak, I would end up with a different final grade depending on which essay I read first. I had told students that the two essays had equal weigh but this was not true: the first one had a much great impact on the final grade than the second. (p.83)  20 psychological principles for teachers #11 Expectations

Thus evaluation of material must include a process that reduces instructor bias. This can include blind grading of materials, peer evaluations, and multiple drafts to encourage constructive feedback that encourages motivation and reduces the halo effect.

For tips on how to implement the principles into practices, visit:

TOP 20 PRINCIPLES FROM PSYCHOLOGY FOR PreK–12 TEACHING AND LEARNING, Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education

Additional Resources:

• Culture Re-BootTEACHER EXPECTATIONS
• THE IMPACT OF EXPECTATIONS ON TEACHING & LEARNING
• Expectations and Student Outcomes