Teachers' attitudes and students' opposition. School misconduct as a reaction to teachers' diminished effort and affect

Abstract

Recent decades have seen many studies dealing with the effects of teacher expectations. While most have focused on students' cognitive outcomes, we relate teacher expectations to student deviancy. We expect low expectations to be associated with students' feelings of futility and less teacher support, which, according to respectively strain theory and social control theory, give rise to misconduct. Multilevel analyses of data (2004–2005) from 11,844 students and 2104 teachers in 84 Flemish secondary schools suggest that, in schools where teacher expectations are low, students report less perceived teacher support, which is associated with higher rates of self-reported school misconduct.

Introduction

Educational researchers agree that teacher attitudes can have a profound impact on students' educational growth (e.g., USA: Brophy & Good, 1970; Jussim & Harber, 2005; Rosenthal, 2002; France: Trouilloud, Sarrazin, Martinek, & Guillet, 2002; Belgium: Agirdag and Van Houtte, 2011, Van Houtte & Van Maele, 2012; UK: Rubie-Davies, Hattie, & Hamilton, 2006). The best known of these is the pioneering study by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) that established the ‘Pygmalion’ effect. The authors describe how teacher expectations regarding students' ability shape those students' later educational success, irrespective of actual ability. Students whom teachers label as the “gifted” in class make the greatest progress, primarily because of differential treatment by teachers (Jussim, 1986; Rubovits & Maehr, 1971). This highly influential study intensified researchers' interest in the consequences of teacher expectations. Generally, this kind of research agrees that when teachers have low expectations of some of their students, these students make less academic progress (Hinnant, O'Brien, & Ghazarian, 2009; Jussim & Harber, 2005).

While the bulk of the research on the effects of teachers' attitudes has dealt with students' cognitive outcomes, fewer studies have focused on behavioral responses. However, it can be supposed that certain teacher attitudes may trigger behavioral reactions from students in class. In particular, students can be expected to show disruptive behavior when they perceive that teachers have low expectations of them. It has been suggested that teachers' attitudes shape their treatment of students in two ways (Jussim, 1986; Rosenthal, 2002). First, when their expectations of some students are low, they spend less effort and time teaching these students (Jussim, 1986). When this reduced effort is perceived by students, it can be expected to engender feelings of goal blockage, which might, according to general strain theory (Agnew, 1985, 1992), lead to feelings of strain and ultimately to acting out by students in class. Secondly, lower expectations result in less supportive teacher–student relations (Jussim, 1986; Rubovits & Maehr, 1971). According to social control theory, these less cohesive bonds relate to deviancy in youngsters (Hirschi, 1969). Hence there are theoretical reasons to expect that low teacher expectations, when perceived by students, result not only in less academic progress, but in an active oppositional behavioral response from students as well. Examining the association between teacher expectations and students' school-disruptive behavior adds not only to our knowledge concerning the effects of teacher expectations, but is relevant for school deviancy research as well. While studies have dealt with the role of teachers in preventing school misconduct, most focus on the teacher–student relationship as the main determinant of student misbehavior. These studies show that when teachers make sure that students feel supported, and, more generally, feel at home in school, students are less likely to break the school rules (e.g., Demanet & Van Houtte, 2011a; Freidenfelt Liljeberg, Eklund, Väfors Fritz, & af Klinteberg, 2011; Jenkins, 1997). However, little is known about the role of teacher attitudes and expectations in student deviancy.

While previous research relating teacher and student characteristics focused either exclusively on teacher or student data (e.g., Baker, Grant, & Morlock, 2008; Hallinan, 2008), the current study relates teacher-reported data to student-reported data. More specifically, we examine the relationship between teachers' self-reported expectations of students, and students' self-reported school misconduct. Methodologically, this is possible by considering individual teacher attitudes as manifestations of a teacher culture at school. As such, these attitudes can be related to student characteristics through a multilevel framework, in which the teacher culture is added as a school-level feature, and the student outcome as an individual-level feature (see also Van Houtte, 2004, Van Houtte, 2011). Consequently, we do not focus on expectations individual teachers have about individual students, but rather on the effect of the teacher culture – that is, beliefs teachers in the same school share about their students in general (see also Van Houtte, 2004). Previous research has shown that the level of school deviancy displayed by students varies between schools and that school-level factors can be introduced to account for these differences (Demanet & Van Houtte, 2011b; Eitle & Eitle, 2003; Gottfredson, Gottfredson, Payne, & Gottfredson, 2005). Given the theoretical reasoning linking teachers' expectations and students' school misconduct, we propose that between-school differences in misconduct can be explained by teachers' differential expectations. Hence our first research question is whether school-wide teacher expectations relate to students' chances of misbehaving at school – taking into account students' gender, socio-economic status, grade, ethnicity, track, and prior achievement (see Section 4.3). The second is whether an eventual association between school-wide teacher expectations and school misconduct is mediated by the students' sense of academic futility, as held by strain theory (Agnew, 1985, 1992), or by students' perceived teacher support, as suggested by social control theory (Hirschi, 1969).