Helping Students Develop Realistic Expectancies for Success

The research on expectancy and value beliefs provides a number of implications for teaching practice. We offer the following suggestions as a guide, although these principles will need to be adapted to the specific classroom context.

1. Help students maintain relatively accurate but high expectations and perceptions of competence and avoid the illusion of incompetence.

   Students are motivated to engage in tasks and achieve when they believe they can accomplish the task. Teachers need to provide accurate feedback to students to help them develop reasonable perceptions of their competence, but at the same time communicate that their competence and skills will continue to develop.

   Mr. Dearborn tries to provide positive but accurate feedback to all students on their written work. He writes on their papers about their demonstrated level of understanding of the content as well as their level of effort (as perceived by him). Some students do a hasty paper and he makes sure to note this in his written comments. He often speaks with the students individually to ask them why they did not try very hard or did not do very well. Given this information, he tries to help the students see how they can increase their effort or performance. Sometimes, he shows them papers of students in his previous classes so they can see models of good papers. He talks to the students about how they might write a paper at the level of the model. At the same time, Mr. Dearborn makes sure that all students know what they did incorrectly; he does not give insincere feedback to boost their self-esteem.

2. Students’ perceptions of competence develop not only from accurate feedback from the teacher but also through actual success on challenging academic tasks.

   Keep tasks and assignments at a relatively challenging but reasonable level of difficulty.Although practice on easy tasks is helpful for building automaticity of skills, children also need to be challenged to be motivated and to learn new skills. Tasks should be set at a level of difficulty where most children in the classroom can master the assignment with some effort. They should not be too easy and especially not too difficult so that most children fail at the task.

   Ms. Rivera has available many different levels of classroom assignments for her middle school science students. Over the years, she has collected a number of different projects, experiments, labs, and workbook assignments that provide her with a diversity of tasks with differing levels of challenge. All of the students in her class do a common set of seventh-grade science tasks, but she also has extra-credit assignments available for those who can go beyond the basic material. In addition, she has other extra-credit assignments that are below grade level that she uses with students who are struggling with the content. This mixture of common and individualized tasks allows children the opportunity to be successful and at the same time be challenged.

3. Students’ perceptions of competence are domain specific and are not equivalent to global self-esteem.

   It is more productive for academic learning to help students develop their self-perceptions of competence rather than their global self-esteem.Although global self-esteem can be important for general mental health, in academic domains it is more important for students’ learning that they have accurate feedback about their performance and begin to develop accurate and positive perceptions of their competence. General self-esteem improvement may not be that helpful, particularly when students know that they are having difficulties. Older children especially will conclude that the praise is insincere and that they lack ability to perform the task.

   At the beginning of this chapter, Rachel, Kevin, and Jacob all showed the domain specificity of their beliefs about school tasks and athletic tasks. Their teachers provide them with accurate feedback about their performance in their subject area. The teachers avoid global and nonspecific feedback (“You are a good person,” “You are all special in some way,” or “You should feel good about yourself”) in favor of specific feedback about their actual performance.