Teacher expectations in a university setting: the perspectives of teachers

ABSTRACT

This study was designed to investigate the bases of teacher expectations in higher education. The first author interviewed 20 university teachers from an English-as-a-foreign-language course, exploring their expectations for the first-year undergraduates in their classes. The grounded theory method was adopted to analyse the data that had been collected. The results showed that for this sample of 20 teachers, student characteristics were important contributing factors to their expectations in the teachers’ university settings. The factors the teachers considered important included students’ (a) prior academic achievement, (b) motivation, (c) study skills, and (d) academic discipline. Also, teacher characteristics were found to be another major source of these university teachers’ expectations, including teachers’ (a) past teaching and learning experience and (b) teaching self-efficacy. The findings suggested that the bases of teacher expectations in higher education may differ from those at the elementary or secondary school level.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher expectations
• teacher self-efficacy
• undergraduate
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Zheng Li, PhD, is a lecturer in College of International Studies, Southwest University, China. Her research interests are teacher expectations and beliefs with a focus on teacher expectation effects in tertiary education. Her work is mostly centred on individual differences that play a role in expectancy effects. She has published articles in academic journals and attended and given presentations at international academic conferences.

Christine M. Rubie-Davies is a Professor of Education, Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her primary research interests are teacher expectations and beliefs that moderate expectancy effects. Christine primarily focusses on teacher expectation effects for disadvantaged groups. She has published six books and numerous articles and chapters in prestigious presses, has won national and international awards for research, teaching and service, and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number SWU17096113] and the Teaching Reformation Funds of the Southwest Universities [grant number 2015JY062].