Investigating how the accuracy of teacher expectations of pupil performance relate to socioeconomic and genetic factors

Teacher expectations of pupil ability can influence pupil’s educational progression, impacting subsequent streaming and exam level entry. Systematic errors in the accuracy of teacher expectations of pupil achievement may therefore have a lasting detrimental effect on a child’s education and life prospects. Associations between socioeconomic and demographic factors with teacher expectation accuracy have been previously investigated, but it is not known how expectation accuracy may relate to genetic factors. We investigated these relationships using data on nationally standardized exam results at ages 11 and 14 from a UK longitudinal cohort study. We found that teacher expectation of achievement was strongly correlated with subsequent achievement, that teacher expectation accuracy was patterned by pupil socioeconomic background but not teacher characteristics, and that teacher expectation accuracy related to pupil’s genetic liability to education. We find no strong evidence for heritability in teacher reporting accuracy, suggesting that the majority of variation in teacher expectation accuracy can be attributed to non-genetic factors.