Teacher Expectations for the Disadvantaged

SamaBaroom
Dr Nicholas SicIliano
PS10103
April 12
Teacher Expectations for the Disadvantaged
According to Rosenthal and Jacobson the central problem is the condition of poverty. It is believed that the children from poor families lag behind in school due to the fact that they are disadvantaged. When a child is from a poor family, they are bound to be disadvantaged when it comes to school work. At times, they may come to school hungry. This will subject them to lack of concentration when others are able to concentrate. Such children may also be subjected to a lot of work at home due to lack of house helps or machines for making work easier such that they do not get time to do revision or to do the homework given to them by the teachers.
The disadvantaged child includes the Negro American and the Mexican American. They are basically the children who live in poverty. They are regarded as lower class children. Those children experience difficulties in the education system because they are subjected to the same conditions as those that do not experience the difficulties of being disadvantaged. They bear the harsh conditions of schooling in education facilities led by mainly the middle class teachers. Since the disadvantaged children are the minority in the school setting, their needs mail fail to be met. This subjects them to difficulties because they feel discriminated. They are forced to put in more efforts in order to be at par with the others but most of the times they never achieve this goal.
The hypothesis for these children is that, the teachers’ expectation for those children is not met. This is because the teacher fails to put in to consideration the socio economic back ground of those children. For instance, the teacher may give home work to the learners and expect them to have completed by the following day. The children from the poor families may fail to complete the work following commitment to other chores at home due to lack of machines used in the homes of those that are not disadvantaged. For instance, those children may have to manually wash their clothes while the children from the well up families use washing machines. The disadvantaged children may therefore not get the time to do the home work. The teacher’s expectation will therefore not be met.
The plan involves administration of an intelligence test at the beginning of the year. The purpose of this intelligence test is to ascertain the intellectual level of the students when they are not subjected to the disadvantages associated with their socio economic status. In order to curb the suspicion that may arise, the learners are told that such is a project being done in conjunction with the Harvard University. Following the administration of the intelligence test, 20 percent of the students are diagnosed as potential academic spotters. This kind of test enables the teachers to identify the intellectual level of the learners without the influence of the hard conditions of their socio economic background. This enables the teachers to accurately consider the background of the learners in postulating their expectations from the learners.
There are two categories of expectations depending with the validity. An expectation is valid ...