Seeing Failure Through Teachers’ Eyes: How Teachers Define Student Failure in the Classroom

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 1:45 pm - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Through Teachers’ Perceptions: Recognition, Power, and Professional Realities

Abstract

Given the potency of beliefs in impacting how an individual judges, assesses, and evaluates, this paper explores a critical but underexamined area in teaching and learning: how teachers define student failure. While research has examined teacher expectations and attributions of failure, the existing literature always centered on teacher response towards researcher-defined student failures, instead of failures derived from the perspective of the teachers themselves. This paper addresses this gap through the first systematic mixed-methods investigation of teacher definitions of student failure. It presents four studies (n = 328), and together they investigate two research questions: (a) How do in-service high school teachers define student failure? and (b) Do teachers respond to struggling students differently based on how they define student failure?

Author

• Xinyu S. Pan, Bank Street College of Education