2025 Theses Doctoral

From Belief to Action: How Failure Beliefs Influence Teacher Response to Struggling Students

Pan, Xinyu S.

Given the potency of belief constructs in impacting how an individual judges, assesses, and evaluates, a central concern in the field of teaching and learning is how teachers’ beliefs influence their instructional behaviors in the classroom and their interactions with their students. An area of teaching beliefs that has gained additional attention in recent years is teacher beliefs related to student failure. There is now rich literature on teacher expectations and attributions of student failure, and how both belief constructs impact instructional choices. Research in both fields falls short, however, in that neither explicitly explored how teachers define student failure. Instead, both fields focus on the teachers’ affective responses to specific researcher-defined student failures. This is a missed opportunity because it ignores the potential impact of teachers’ own definition of student failure on their instructional behaviors and actions.

Using a mixed-methods research approach, I addressed this gap by undertaking the first systematic investigation of how teachers define student failure. First, I present three studies that were conducted to generate insights into how teachers define student failure. Second, I discuss a scale that I developed for the analysis, Teacher Definitions of Student Failure Scale (TDFS), that captures which struggles teachers consider to be student failures. In other words, the scale captures what a given teacher defines as student failures in their classrooms. To my knowledge, such a measure does not exist. I then present a fourth pre-registered study leveraging a repeated-measures design to examine how teachers’ definition of student failure relates to their response to struggling students. Together, these studies (n = 328) served to investigate two overarching 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?