The Interactive Effects of Consonant and Dissonant Teacher Expectancy and Feedback Communication on Student Performance in a Natural School Setting

Abstract

High, neutral, and low statements of success expectancy were paired with positive and negative success feedback statements in a 2 x 3 factorial design involving 43 low-achieving high school students. The communication was applied to reading comprehension lessons in 10 daily class sessions with two dependent variables, comprehension (test scores) and effort expended as measured by the rate of lessons completed on 33 reading exercises. Incongruent communication combinations (e.g., high success expectancy-negative feedback) produced higher comprehension than congruent combinations (e.g., high success-positive feedback). There were no reliable differences in effort expended. The results are amenable to both an arousal theory and an attribution theory interpretation with some evidence that the attribution interpretation explains the findings more adequately.