While schools are thought to use meritocratic criteria when evaluating students, research indicates that teachers hold lower expectations for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, it is unclear what the unique impact is of specific student traits on teacher expectations, as different traits are often correlated to one another in real life. Moreover, research has neglected the role of the institutional context, yet tracking procedures, financial barriers to education, and institutionalized cultural beliefs may influence how teachers form expectations. We conducted a factorial survey experiment in three contexts that vary with respect to these institutional characteristics (The United States, New York City; Norway, Oslo; the Netherlands, Amsterdam). We asked elementary school teachers to express expectations for hypothetical students whose characteristics were experimentally manipulated. Teachers in the different contexts used the same student traits when forming expectations, yet varied in the importance they attached to these traits. In Amsterdam – where teachers track students on the basis of their performance and tracking bears significant consequences for educational careers – we found a large impact of student performance. In Oslo – where institutions show an explicit commitment to equality of educational opportunity – teachers based their expectations less on student effort, and seemed to make more inferences about student performance by a student's socio-economic background. New York teachers seemed to make few inferences about student performance based on their socio-economic background.

虽然学校被认为在评估学生时使用精英标准，但研究表明，教师对来自弱势背景的学生的期望较低。然而，尚不清楚特定学生特征对教师期望的独特影响是什么，因为不同的特征在现实生活中往往相互关联。此外，研究忽视了制度环境的作用，但跟踪程序、教育的经济障碍和制度化的文化信仰可能会影响教师如何形成期望。我们在三种不同的制度特征（美国，纽约市；挪威，奥斯陆；荷兰，阿姆斯特丹）中进行了因子调查实验。我们要求小学教师表达对特征被实验操纵的假设学生的期望。不同背景下的教师在形成期望时使用相同的学生特质，但他们对这些特质的重视程度各不相同。在阿姆斯特丹——教师根据学生的表现跟踪学生，跟踪对教育事业产生重大影响——我们发现学生的表现有很大的影响。在奥斯陆——各机构明确承诺教育机会平等——教师的期望较少基于学生的努力，似乎更多地根据学生的社会经济背景来推断学生的表现。