In this paper, I discuss the conceptual definition of student “participation” in teaching activities in my phd-project. I consider why it is relevant to conceptualise student school “effort” differently, when studying the formation of teacher expectations. In this paper I ask the question; what is the relevance of a concept of “participation” in the study of teacher expectations?

I start with a critical perspective on the way that teachers evaluate and attribute meaning to student effort, if swayed by “meritocratic beliefs” (Mijs, 2016, 2021). In a recent study, Geven et al. (2021) suggests that teachers might consent to educational inequality, because they believe differences in educational attainment is due to fair meritocratic principles of educational attainment. In this paper, I argue that meritocratic beliefs can be problematic for justice in education, because a belief in fair meritocratic selection obscures the structural component of inequality in general (Batruch et al., 2022; Mijs & Hoy, 2022). Meritocracy implies that achievement or success is awarded on the account of merit; for students, innate ability and the effort put into school work is believed to determine opportunities for learning and educational attainment (Batruch et al., 2022). Mijs (2021) argus that education in fact distorts meritocratic ideals, by legitimising a lack of achievement as personal failure. But are all students given the same opportunities to learn and achieve?

Teacher expectancy research consistently presents evidence that non-meritocratic student traits have a significant impact on teacher expectations, indicating that opportunities for learning are not distributed solely on account of effort. This provides support for a critique of meritocratic selection. Recent reviews show consistent evidence that teacher expectations are biased against student gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status (Murdock-Perriera & Sedlacek, 2018; Wang et al., 2018). Also, high- and low-expectation teachers tend to create very different instructional and socioemotional classroom environments (Rubie-Davies, 2014; Rubie-Davies, 2007) and present more group work opportunities, assign cognitively harder tasks, give more positive feedback, and provide more instruction to high-expectancy students (Aydin & Ok, 2022; Babad, 2010). This suggests that the stratification of opportunities for learning in classroom teaching can be reproduced by bias in teacher expectations and mediated by teacher differential behaviour. This indicates that, while school effort is a prime indicator of merit for teachers, “merit” is itself determined by non-meritocratic factors and meritocracy violates its own merit principle (Mijs, 2016).

I present findings from an observational study of student participation in teaching activities, suggesting that student effort should not be operationalised disconnected from classroom teaching. My findings indicate that the interpretation of student effort changes according to different expectation structures enacted by teachers throughout the course of a lesson. Further, observations suggests that expectation structures determine the interpretation of student effort as either good or bad, while simultaneously being dependent upon form of teaching. Also, students participate very differently under the same expectation structure.

Conclusively, my findings point to the relevance of a different conceptualisation of effort that aligns better with the volatility of classroom teaching, and attribute agency to students according to what is expected of them at different times during a teaching activity. Geven et al. (2021) investigate teachers’ expectations of student’s chance to attain a bachelor’s degree and examine the impact of student traits, but a disadvantage is that they utilize a narrow conception of effort (p. 7). I propose that a concept of “participation” is relevant in this regard. I argue that it accounts for the complexity and changeable nature of teachers’ evaluation and attribution of meaning to student effort and can have important implications for future vignette experiments. 

I utilize a methodology where the relevance of a conceptualisation of student effort as “participation” in teaching activities is investigated as part of a literature review of teacher expectancy research. The proposed operationalisation of student school effort as “participation” in further studies are based on a qualitative observational study of classroom teaching. In observational study I examine forms of participation among primary school students during different teaching activities, focusing on the school subject’s Danish language and Mathematics. The observational study is conducted in four Danish primary schools selected through a stratified random sampling procedure based on available Danish national school records. Schools are sampled from this procedure, to ensure variation in the student population according to gender (Robinson-Cimpian et al., 2014), ethnicity (Bonefeld & Dickhauser, 2018; Tenenbaum & Ruck, 2007) and socioeconomic status (Geven et al., 2021), which have consistently been found to impact teacher expectations. In the next phase of the study, I statistically examine variations in primary school teachers’ expectations, by conducting a vignette experiment. The analysis of the qualitative data will inform the operationalisation of different forms of participation and descriptions of the classroom context in an experimental vignette study, conducted at a later stage in my project, to ensure high ecological validity of my design (Krolak-Schwerdt et al., 2018).

Following on from the analysis of the qualitative data in my project, the paper concludes by presenting forms of participation observed in my study, with a focus on the classroom context and variations between the school subject’s Danish language and Mathematics. Findings from my observational study indicate that the interpretation of student’s effort change according to different expectation structures enacted by teachers throughout the course of a lesson. The course of a lesson is often characterised by many shifts in the expectation structures, constantly redefining student effort as either good or bad. This shows that expectation structures are volatile. Also, the data indicate that expectation structures are dependent upon form of teaching. This calls for a broader conceptualisation of student effort that align better with the volatility of expectation structures throughout the course of a lesson and during teaching activities, taking this complexity into account. Also, it is important with a concept that attributes agency to students according to what is expected of them at different times during a teaching activity, to account for the complexity and changeable nature of teachers’ evaluation and attribution of meaning to student effort. The qualitative findings could have several implications for the design of future experimental vignette studies investigating the formation of teacher expectations; 1) Vignettes should be operationalised so that they incorporate different forms of participation and 2) either a) several forms of teaching as a varying vignette dimension or b) a precise definition of a certain form of teaching, to ensure proper interpretation of student effort. These additions to the operationalisation of student school effort could increase the ecological validity of experimental vignette studies investigating influential factors on and latent bias in the formation of teacher expectations.

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