Teacher Expectations and Learning: Exploring Data from Prova Brasil 2015 Questionnaire^*

Abstract

The literature on teacher expectations about student learning is situated in an interface between psychology and education and dates back to the works of Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968), Palardy (1969), Alvidrez and Weinstein (1999), and others. One of their findings is that the chances of success in learning are directly related to teacher expectations about students, which allows constructing the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy. This article further reflects on such finding through the analysis of a set of items in Questionário do professor do Saeb 2015 [Saeb 2015 Teacher Questionnaire], which were organized in out-of-school, in-school and student-dependent variables. We used the microdata relative to the 2,274 fifth grade teachers of primary education of the public systems of three state capitals: the best Ideb in 2015 (Curitiba city, Paraná state – 6.3), the worst Ideb (Maceió city, Alagoas state – 4.3) and the greatest variation in Ideb in the 2005-2015 period (Fortaleza city, Ceará state – 63.6%). The data show that, of the three categories in which the items were organized, the lowest coefficients of variation are present in the out-of-school variables, while the highest are found in in-school variables. Observing the coefficients of variation of the student-dependent variables, it is verified that their values are much higher than those of out-of-school variables and at least 50% lower than those of in-school variables. These results show that teacher expectations about student learning problems are more strongly associated with the social environment, educational level and lack of parental support to students’ school life.

Teacher expectation; Learning problems; Large-scale assessment; Self-fulfilling prophecy