Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2025
Abstract
Disability labels for students are indicators that are made known to classroom teachers before the beginning of the year and have the possibility to impact what a teacher might expect from a specific student. The purpose of this study was to better understand how disability labels impact the expectations that teachers have for students, and how providing training to teachers by informing them about the characteristics of a disability or research-based practices to use when teaching students with a specific disability impacts their initial expectations. The researcher administered five different surveys to a group of 31 high school and middle school general and special education teachers, asking about their expectations for a fictitious student. The variables manipulated in each survey were identifying the student with a different disability and providing training on that disability, focusing on either informing the participant about the disability or informing them on research-based practices for teaching that disability, before repeating the initial questions. Participants reported the highest average initial expectations for the student identified as having a speech/language impairment (3.02/5), and the lowest for the student not identified as having a disability (2.61/5). Participants’ expectations improved the most on average for students with specific learning disabilities after receiving informative training (3.37%), but decreased for the student with an other health disability after a similar informative training (-0.49%). These findings imply that teachers do have different expectations for students with different disabilities, and professional development can either improve or worsen teachers’ expectations for students with disabilities.