Christine M. Rubie-Davies

Christine M. Rubie-Davies

Christine M. Rubie-Davies leads the University of Auckland's Teacher Expectation Project and is the first author of a 2015 randomised trial that trained teachers in the practices of high-expectation teaching. Its design is the opposite of the Oak School trick: no one is handed a false label, and the teaching itself changes.

Who they are

The paper, with Elizabeth R. Peterson, Chris G. Sibley and Robert Rosenthal, is titled A teacher expectation intervention: Modelling the practices of high expectation teachers (Contemporary Educational Psychology, 2015, 40, 72-85). Its repository abstract notes that teacher expectation research had few interventions and no randomised controlled trials aimed at changing teachers' practices.

Teachers were randomly assigned to an intervention or a control group. Intervention teachers attended four workshops on high-expectation strategies and planned changes to their classrooms, and researchers made three further visits to check implementation. Over one year, students of intervention teachers improved more in mathematics than those of control teachers, and the teachers were highly satisfied with the changes. The repository record lists eighty-four teachers.

The project's own description names flexible grouping in place of ability grouping, a warm class climate, goal-setting, feedback and nonverbal communication of expectations among the practices taught. A press summary reports a 28 per cent gain in mathematics learning in one year from a Bayesian growth model, but that figure was not confirmed from the paper and is not used in the article.

Key papers

Rubie-Davies, C. M., Peterson, E. R., Sibley, C. G., & Rosenthal, R. (2015). A teacher expectation intervention: Modelling the practices of high expectation teachers. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 40, 72-85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2014.03.003

Key ideas

Change the teaching, not the label. The intervention targets the practices through which expectations reach pupils.

A randomised design. Teachers, not pupils, were randomly assigned, which is the right unit when the treatment is a way of teaching.

Sources

  1. Rubie-Davies, C. M., Peterson, E. R., Sibley, C. G., & Rosenthal, R. (2015). Contemporary Educational Psychology, 40, 72-85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2014.03.003 (University of Auckland repository record; Teacher Expectation Project description).