Raising Expectations Indirectly

Previous experiments have demonstrated that it is possible to raise children's expectations for their own performance at tasks resembling classroom tasks. Experiments reported here show that children will generalize such raised expectations from one task to a second dissimilar task; if children's performance at one task (involving planning a meal) are positively evaluated, they will raise their expectations for their own performance at another task (story telling) where the two tasks require different skills and different knowledge. Results of the present experiments on raising expectations are consistent with previous experiments in that the generalization effect, while significant, is smaller in magnitude than the direct effect. The classroom offers a continuous series of tasks, many unfamiliar, to each child. At particular times, for instance, children must learn graphemephoneme correspondences, cursive handwriting, or the multiplication tables. They must learn how to find their way about the school and learn to ask to get a drink of water. How well children expect to do at each new task, and how well others expect them to do, affect their performance, their self-confidence, their interaction patterns with teachers, their interaction with other students, and often their level of learning (e.g., Brophy and Good; Entwisle and Webster, d; Rosenthal and Jacobson). Some research, in fact, indicates that students' conception of their own ability explains more of the variance in school performance than actual ability (Brookover et al.). The sources of expectations teachers hold have been dramatically highlighted in recent studies. For instance, teachers hold expectations for first-graders they do not even know based on their prior experience with older siblings of the first graders. These hand-me-down expectations affect teacher-pupil interaction (Seaver). Teachers also have expectations based on children's membership in ethnic and/or minority groups. Bikson showed that teachers hear sentences of the same length spoken by black, Chicano, and white children when the actual sentences spoken by the minorify*This research was supported by a grant from the Office of Education (OEG-3-71-0122). We thank Frank Tondrick and Charlotte Harper, principals of the schools involved in the experiments, and students and staff in these schools for their help with the research.