| Abstract: | Current literature suggests that a teacher's expectancies for a pupil may in part determine the pupil's subsequent behavior. This review asks how such expectancies affect the teacher's own behavior, with the goal of determining what teacher behaviors mediate the observed effect on the pupil. A model of this process is proposed, using Skinner's analysis of rule-dependent behavior as an organizational framework for recent research from several fields. The model identifies these sets of independent variables which warrant further investigation: (a) variables affecting the process through which a teacher deduces contingency rules from information about a pupil; (b) variables affecting the content of these rules; and (c) variables affecting the teacher's performance of the rule-specified actions. |
