Yesterday I wrote about high expectations and a new study suggesting that those expectations may become visible in something very concrete: the tasks you give your students. Teachers were much less inclined to assign cognitively challenging mathematics tasks when thinking about low-performing students than when thinking about high-performing students. Today I came across an inclusion study that connects surprisingly well with this finding, but from a completely different angle. This time, it is not about mathematics tasks, but about inclusive education. It is a longitudinal study with a solid sample and results that led both the researchers and me to essentially the same question: do we sometimes expect too little from students, with the best of intentions?

A positive attitude towards inclusion

Tobias Wächter and Julia Gorges investigated whether teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education are related to their students’ academic achievement. Their premise seems logical. Teachers who have a positive attitude towards inclusion and are confident they can effectively implement inclusive education may be more successful. And all of this, in turn, could become visible in their students’ achievement.

The researchers followed students during fifth grade in inclusive schools in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. For the final analyses, they had data from 1,873 students and 173 teachers from 26 schools. Achievement in reading, spelling, and mathematics was measured at the beginning and end of the school year. Among the teachers, the researchers also examined, among other things, their attitudes towards inclusion and their self-efficacy: to what extent were they confident that they could successfully implement inclusive education?

An unexpected result

The researchers expected positive associations, but… they found hardly any. In the analyses at the first measurement point, only greater teacher self-efficacy was positively associated with students’ reading achievement. For spelling and mathematics, there were hardly any of the expected associations.

But the real surprise emerged when the researchers examined what happened over the course of the school year. A more positive teaching-related attitude towards inclusion and greater self-efficacy were associated with slightly lower reading achievement at the end of the school year, even after accounting for reading achievement at the beginning of the year. They did not find such direct associations for spelling and mathematics.

For spelling, however, they found something else. Here, the combination of attitudes and self-efficacy appeared to matter. Among teachers with relatively low self-efficacy, a more positive social attitude towards inclusion was associated with poorer spelling achievement. Among teachers with high self-efficacy, this negative association was not present.

These are anything but simple or unambiguous results. A positive attitude towards inclusion is not simply associated with either better or worse academic achievement. The relationships differ by domain and depend on exactly what is being measured. Above all, however, the expected positive relationships largely fail to materialise.

When good intentions become a pitfall

As soon as I read that, I began contemplating the possible causes for such findings. But how do the researchers explain their findings? There can be a very practical cause for it. It can be that a teacher finds inclusive education important and meaningful, but he/she does not have enough manpower or any other resources to meet his/her objectives. A positive attitude does not guarantee that you have all the means for doing so.

But after that, there is a suggestion of a second, very uncomfortable explanation from the researchers that also struck me instantly. Because of their strong commitment to inclusion, teachers want all students to succeed. As a negative consequence, they may set lower standards for students.

Moreover, the considerable differences between students in an inclusive classroom may lead teachers to expect lower levels of achievement. Or, more simply put: we want to help students and therefore perhaps set the bar lower. And now you may also see the connection with the study I discussed yesterday.

Providing support is different from expecting less

They stress that reduced expectations might, for instance, lead to greater task differentiation and more specific learning targets. Some students could be offered easier assignments or learning objectives. It could seem like assistance. On the other hand, as a teacher, you should take into account what a student can do. But at the same time, there is a risk that precisely those students who underachieve would be given less challenging assignments, which would only motivate them to study.

That is almost the same potential pitfall as in the study I talked about yesterday. Similarly, in that study, the authors observed that teachers are less willing to give difficult tasks to low-performing students. The reason for that would again probably be the best possible intentions. The teachers would like to offer a task which suits the student. But if this is always about the same group of students, then they have few chances to practice complex thinking skills.

The authors of this new research on inclusive education suggest another approach. The expectations and objectives should remain high, while support should be changed. Students, for instance, should have more time, more assistance, or even an alternative path to reach the objective, rather than lowering the objective. In their advice on practice, the authors mention mastery learning, among other solutions.

Inclusion does not mean that everyone does the same things in the same way all the time. There certainly are students who need much more assistance than other students do. In certain cases, students really need modified learning goals. But this does not imply that any difference among the students should lead us to expect less of them.

But wait…

The researchers did not measure in their study whether teachers with more positive attitudes towards inclusion actually had lower expectations. Nor did they observe whether these teachers assigned easier tasks, provided less cognitively challenging instruction, or applied different standards.

This mechanism is a hypothesis proposed by the authors and was not discovered in this study. Indeed, the authors highlight this as an interesting question for future research, and I agree. Are these correlations driven by teachers’ expectations or pupils’ cognitive engagement? It could well be the other way around: experience working with certain students affects the teacher’s attitude to inclusion. We will never know from this study.