The Relations between Teacher Expectations and Pupils\u27Attributes

To investigate the relations between teacher expectations and the pupils\u27 attributes at a month after the beginning of the school year, fourty-one first grade teachers were asked to rate each of his classroom new pupils according to 1) his expectancy for a) scholastic achievement at the end of the first year, b) that of the sixth grade, c) personality development, etc. and 2) his pupils\u27 attributes (nine behavioral characteristics (e.g. activity during school hours,), three kinds of abilities (e.g. reading and writing ability,) and three kinds of his home environmental factors (e.g. socioeconomic status)). The results are as follows: 1) Expectancy score for scholastic achievement (first grade) is highly correlated with ability variables, especially, estimated IQ. Among behavioral characteristics, autonomy, concentration and activity during school hours show relatively high correlation coefficients with expectancy. Home environmental variables are not so closely related to expectancy score as described above. 2) Ability and behavioral characteristics, as a whole, show lower correlations with the expectancy score for the sixth grade than those for the first grade. Among those, curiosity is only one trait which increased in the correlation coefficient. It seems that this trait imply the intellectual potentiality. Home environmental factors also increased in the relation with expectancy for the sixth grade achivement. 3) Expectancy for the personality development does not corelate with behavioral characteristics so highly as we expected. Rather, this expectancy and the expectancy for the scholastic achievement (first and sixth grade) correlate moderately to each other