An important study indicated that teachers form expectations about their students' chances for academic success and then interact with students on the basis of those expectations.
Teachers may be unaware that they have low expectations for some students; even when they become aware, they may have difficulty changing their expectations because their beliefs and biases have developed over the years. Second, what actually communicates expectations to students is teacher behavior. If teachers consciously work to change their biases but don't change their behavior toward those students from whom they have tended to expect less, their change of attitude will have little effect on student achievement.
With low-expectancy students, teachers tend to make less eye contact, smile less, make less physical contact, and engage in less playful or light dialogue.
With low-expectancy students, teachers tend to make less eye contact, smile less, make less physical contact, and engage in less playful or light dialogue.
Teachers tend to call on low-expectancy students less often, ask less challenging questions, delve into their answers less deeply, and reward them for less rigorous responses.
Teachers simply make sure that they exhibit the same positive behaviors to all students—smiling, involving students in good-natured discussions, and engaging in appropriate physical contact.
When teachers change this behavior, some students might feel uncomfortable. They will probably need to go through this uncomfortable phase, however, to arrive at a place where they will risk putting forth new ideas and asking questions that disclose their confusion about certain topics. Because this is the goal— for all students to embrace complex and challenging issues and for the teacher to acknowledge and respect their ideas.
Seligman and colleagues' explanation of learned helplessness focuses on three components: outcome contingency, mediating cognitions, and behavior outcomes.
The idea of learned helplessness has helped researchers and educators understand why some students repeatedly experience more failures and give up—often before even trying.
The serious implications of learned [p. 571 ↓]helplessness include the failure to initiate action, failure to learn, and emotional problems such as depression. There are several ways that teachers can influence students' outlooks on learning, including attribution retraining, encouragement, and focusing on mastery goals.
Attribution theory's explanation of learned helplessness asserts that when persons perceive noncontingency, they search for a causal attribution to explain it; this attribution then mediates their response.
Recent research in educational psychology has found ego or self-worth maintenance to be a more fertile approach to achievement motivation and failure resiliency than just learned helplessness.
In addition, teachers should provide moderate difficulty tasks that students are able to accomplish with effort. Success on tasks that are too easy does not produce healthy ability or effort attributions, and failure on tasks that are too difficult usually results in unhealthy, low ability attributions.
Research shows that attribution retraining is an effective intervention for learned helplessness. By increasing students' awareness of the attributions they make, their self-esteem, self-efficacy, and learning can be improved, and their anxiety and frustration can be reduced.
Overall, findings from this investigation confirm previous results suggesting students with an incremental view of ability who endorse a mastery goal orientation display greater persistence than do individuals with an entity view of ability who endorse social comparison goals
Nevertheless, they add to these findings by indicating that students with an entity view of ability can be successfully primed to pursue mastery goals, resulting in improved performance.