Abstract
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We present and implement a framework for studying teachers��� informal expectations in the context of reading education. The framework is called Social Judgment Theory (SJT) and it entails an idiographic analysis of various aspects of cues used to form policies and make judgments. Major attention focuses on the relative importance attached to each cue and the overall relationship between the pattern used by the teacher and the pattern that actually obtains in the reading ecology. Preliminary work is described that examines the expectation policies of novice teachers when considering potential achievements in vocabulary development and reading comprehension. A multivariate application of SJT revealed that the novice teachers studied held generally accurate expectation policies with respect to the ecology, but showed large individual differences in the importance they placed on various cues. Subsequent cluster analysis of the expectation policies revealed several different types of policy weighting schemes. We draw implications of the general application of SJT for the study of informal classroom policies, and we point to the next step���the provision of policy feedback to teachers for the purposes of heightening awareness and improving policy accuracy. �� 1986, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.