Examining the Influence and Impact of Educator Expectations on Children’s Learning
Project 1: Teaching teams in kindergarten: Comparing educator expectations in kindergarten
Funding: SEED Grant, Faculty of Education, Queen’s University
Educators incorporate information from various sources as they form their academic expectations for students. The student record of prior achievement is the most salient factor that educators use to form their expectations for children’s achievement. Research on the factors that influence educator expectations has primarily focused on the ways teachers assimilate various pieces of information about students. More recently, there is an interest in moving away from this perspective and focusing more on teacher factors that may influence these differing expectations. The purpose of this research is to explore the factors that contribute to the formation of educator expectations in full-day play-based Kindergarten in Ontario. This study examines reports from Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) and teachers on their teaching beliefs, roles, teaching practices, and interactions that support students in meeting curriculum expectations. This study examines the differences in the two groups in terms of how their expectations are formed and in turn how they affect processes leading to child outcomes.
Project 2: Inequity at the starting line: The influence of teacher expectations, beliefs, and practices on learning outcomes in kindergarten
Funding: SSHRC Insight Development Grant
Co-Investigator: Dr. Angela Pyle
Teachers are the most important in school factor affecting student achievement. As a result, researchers are interested in the ways that teacher factors (i.e., teacher expectations, beliefs, and practices) influence the learning opportunities teachers provide in their classrooms. Teacher expectations regarding student potential differ based on student characteristics such as gender, ethno-racial background, and socioeconomic status. Teacher expectations can significantly affect the learning opportunities that are provided to students. This is highly problematic because teacher expectations are often inaccurate, have long lasting influence, and differentially affect the future achievement of girls, racialized students, and children living in poverty.
Our understanding of how teacher expectations affect equitable learning opportunities and learning outcomes is limited in kindergarten because current research focuses on older children. Furthermore, the field of teacher expectations has failed to examine how the key teacher factors of expectations, beliefs, and practices combine to influence children’s learning outcomes. This has resulted in disjointed knowledge and barriers to applying findings in practice. Researchers have called for a focus on how expectations are informed by beliefs, but the extant research currently explores specific teacher factors in isolation; research examining relations among teacher factors is missing. Our research responds to this challenge by moving away from the traditional approach of exploring these constructs separately, toward a more complete examination of the relations among teacher expectations, beliefs, and practices. Clarifying the ways that teacher beliefs contribute to expectations and result in differential teaching practices that affect learning outcomes is an important step in addressing equity concerns in kindergarten. This research addresses three objectives: 1) examines the relations among kindergarten teacher expectations, beliefs, and practices; 2) analyzes the influence of teacher expectations, beliefs, and practices on learning outcomes; and 3) describes how teacher expectations, beliefs, and practices can lead to inequitable learning opportunities and affect learning outcomes in kindergarten.