ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses at the literature on teacher's expectations in four ways and examine its strengths and limitations. It discusses four main possibilities teacher-pupil interactions, pupil self-perceptions, curriculum coverage, and organizational decisions on grouping and differentiating pupils for learning. There are several reasons for the importance of examining teacher expectations. First, teacher expectations have been assigned a leading role in explanations of educational failure. Secondly, teacher expectations also have a main role in conceptualizations of school effectiveness and improvement. A third main reason for the importance of teacher expectations is that it is an example of an educational process to which social psychological theory has been systematically applied, and which, in contrast to much other research on teacher-pupil relations, has been insightful and to a degree successful in explaining links with student outcomes. Fourth point is that research on teacher's expectations serves to highlight some important issues and dilemmas in any attempt to understand relationships between teaching and student outcomes.
