THE IMPACT OF ACHIEVEMENT EXPECTATIONS AND HANDWRITING QUALITY ON SCORING ESSAY TESTS

Since Rosenthal (1966) proposed that teacher expectancies actually influenced children's behavior, the expectancy hypothesis has been tested in a variety of settings. The data are controversial but the basic idea of expectancy's impact on student and teacher behavior remains intriguing. For example, Palardy (1969), Brophy and Good (1970), Entwistle, Cornell, and Epstein (1972), and Seaver (1973) have all reported substantial studies that tend to bear out the expectancy hypothesis in classroom situations. These data suggest that expectancy may indeed play an important role in regulating the classroom activities of students. But expectations appear also to alter the judgments of professional test administrators. Jacobs and DeGraaf (1973) showed that in individual tests, examiners actually gave higher scores to test records associated with high expectancy than they gave to low expectancy records, even though record content for the two groups was identical. The present study was designed to bring the expectancy phenomenon into classroom testing. Specifically the purpose of this study was to see what the effect of an achievement expectancy would be on scores given essay tests which varied in quality of handwriting. Several studies (James, 1927; Sheppard, 1929; Chase, 1968; Marshall & Powers, 1969) have shown that quality of handwriting is related to scores given to essay examinations; that is, students with good handwriting receive higher scores. The purpose of this study was to vary both handwriting quality and achievement expectation (1) to see if expectations are related to scores given essay tests, and (2) to determine how handwriting quality interacts with levels of expectancy.