Education: Gender and Teacher Expectations

welcome to this tutor to you sociology topic video on gender and education looking at teacher expectations what do we mean when we talk about teacher expectations in examining the relationship between gender and achievement teacher expectations refers to the differing expectations that teachers have of their male and female students it also refers to the way that they

interact with those students based upon those expectations for example teachers may have higher expectations of certain students in their class and this can lead to those students being pushed further given more challenging work and therefore achieving higher we can see evidence of this in rosenthal and jacobs in the seminal study pygmalion in the classroom which

highlighted the importance of high expectations and the self-fulfilling prophecy of being viewed positively leading to more positive outcomes for students conversely lower expectations of students can lead to underperformance due to negative interactions with students so how do teachers expectations of boys and girls differ well mitch also brown suggests that teachers tend to have

lower expectations of boys than girls and will often turn a blind eye to minor infractions of the rules based upon the notion of boys will be boys this is backed up by jackson and her research into boys particularly working class boys teachers will have lower expectations of these boys and will accept lower quality

work from them not pushing or challenging them to go any further however francis found that boys were treated more harshly than girls in the classroom yet agreed with other research that boys tend to dominate classroom space and the teacher's time albeit in a negative way so according to francis it is boys who