ABSTRACT
Today, teachers’ differential behavior towards different students is a major issue in the psychology of the heterogeneous classroom. Hundreds of TDB studies were conducted in the 1970s and 1980s following the publication of Pygmalion in the Classroom and the intense interest in teacher expectancies. As mentioned in the previous chapter, TDB was considered the major link in the conceptualized chain of the self-fulfi llment of teachers’ expectations, constituting the behavioral mediation of SFP. For teacher expectations to infl uence students’ performance or behavior, they must me transmitted to students via differential behavior, which is, in turn, perceived by students, and infl uences their self-image, their self-expectations, and eventually their academic performance as well.
