Teacher Expectations Matter

By Nicholas Papageorge, S. Gershenson, K. Kang. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2016

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We show that tenth-grade teacher expectations affect students' likelihood of college completion. Our approach leverages a unique feature of a nationally representative dataset: two teachers provided their educational expectations for each student. Identification exploits teacher disagreements about the same student, an idea we formalize using a measurement error model. We estimate an elasticity of college completion with respect to teachers' expectations of 0.12. On average, teachers are overly optimistic, though white teachers are less so with black students. More accurate beliefs are counterproductive if there are returns to optimism or sociodemographic gaps in optimism. We find evidence of both.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba2fc6c33b72759fb5c2ea86ba3874ca513d7128

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Bias in the Air: A Nationwide Exploration of Teachers’ Implicit Racial Attitudes, Aggregate Bias, and Student Outcomes (2020, background): “Teachers with implicit biases are liable to provide biased evaluations of students’ academic performance or potential, which can negatively impact Black students through self-fulfilling prophecies (Papageorge et al., 2016) or by triggering stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995).”
Implicit Stereotypes: Evidence from Teachers’ Gender Bias* (2019, background): “Teachers’ erroneous expectations may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby prior beliefs are selfconfirming in equilibrium (Spencer et al., 1999; Papageorge et al., 2018): biased teachers may set a lower bar for the learning of students from stigmatized groups or fail to encourage them to fulfi”
Teachers’ Bias Against the Mathematical Ability of Female, Black, and Hispanic Students (2019, result): “It is also worth noting that a recent study by Papageorge, Gershenson, and Kang (2019) investigated how 10th-grade teachers’ expectations for their students’ educational attainment affected later college going.”