Anxiety and Teacher Expectations

• Rosenthal and Jacobson

• when teachers expected more from their students, their iqs increased

• independent variable: whether teachers were told the student had a high iq and were going to bloom

• experimenter bias

• factors that mediated the effect of teachers expectations on students’ growth

  • teachers instilled more confidence in the students, increasing their self-efficacy
  • younger subjects were more malleable and more likely to be influenced by the teacher
  • expecting the students to be right and making them a model, giving more positive attention and creating more opportunities
  • more challenging tasks
  • labeled the students
  • teachers of young students have different teaching styles - more student centered, more reinforcement

• self-fulfilling prophecy - because they were expected to grow, they did

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• Maloney and Beilock

• antecedents of math anxiety:

  • math anxiety develops early 
  • related to teacher dispositions towards math (social influence)
  • kids who don’t have strong foundations in math are more math anxious
  • gender influences: female teachers’ attitudes are more contagious to female students

• how to reduce math anxiety:

  • have students write out their anxieties
  • reconstrue anxious symptoms as arousal, not as something negative

• impacts of anxiety:

  • decreases motivation
  • decreases self-efficacy

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