Question: As a teacher I often hear myself telling a student that I have higher expectations of him/her than s/he does! With so many outside influences on a child that are beyond our control, how big an impact can expectations of a teacher (or ethos of a school) actually have?

There is a vast amount of literature on the influences of perceptions of intelligence and teacher expectations on students actual academic performance. Below is an excerpt from my PhD thesis which highlights various aspects of teacher expectations on students performance:

Physical attractiveness has long been claimed to produce a favorable bias. Dion, Berscheid and Walster (1972) argued that, “what is beautiful is good” (p.285). This physical attractiveness bias is a well-studied example of Thorndike’s (1920) ‘halo effect’ which leads to consistent, but not necessarily accurate, positive personality judgments of physically attractive people. The influence of the ‘attractiveness halo’ is of particular concern in education, in which all students deserve the best possible opportunity to achieve their potential in the classroom, regardless of their inherent attractiveness.
In line with the ‘attractiveness halo’, perceptions of attractiveness are strongly correlated to perceptions of intelligence (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhiijani & Longo, 1991). Rosenthal and Jacobson’s (1968) Pygmalion study showed that a teacher’s expectations of intelligence affect a student’s achievement (see also Babad, Inbar & Rosenthal, 1982). If an attractive student were perceived as more intelligent, the expectancy effect would suggest higher expectations would be placed on attractive students over unattractive students and, through greater attention and other forms of self-fulfilling prophecies, these expectations could in turn influence academic achievement (Clifford & Walster, 1973). Although there are specific exceptions to the rule (such as the ‘dumb blonde’ or less attractive ‘nerd’ stereotypes), there is evidence that the general rule holds more broadly (Ritts, Patterson, & Tubbs, 1992).
Anderson and Rosenthal (1968) emphasized the importance in the timing of expectancy induction in changing the expectations of students. Raudenbush (1984) showed that expectancy induction before teachers had time to get to know their students correlated with higher impact of expectancy. Thus, in an unfortunate but possible educational setting in which an instructor has little or no time or opportunity to get to know their students, it is likely that first impressions will be critical.
Supporting this concern, Clifford and Walster (1973) found a significant correlation between physical appearance and teacher expectations. Indeed, Dusek and Joseph (1983) conducted a meta-analysis of fourteen studies investigating physical attractiveness as a measure of teacher expectancy and concluded that facial attractiveness is significantly correlated with teacher expectancies of academic performance and personality attributes. Keneally, Frude and Shaw (1988) subsequently found a positive correlation between teachers’ ratings of attractiveness and expectations regarding children’s social, academic, and leadership skills. Teachers judged attractive children as more social, confident, popular, academically strong, and more likely to become leaders than students who are less attractive (Keneally, Frude & Shaw, 1988).
This general pattern continues to be born out in a meta-analytic review by Ritts, Patterson, and Tubbs (1992). They found that attractive students are more likely to be ascribed positive educational traits than unattractive students. Attractive students were judged as more intelligent, having more academic potential, better grades, and various other positive educational traits. It was further noted that other variables like gender, race, and past performance also affected expectations, but did not significantly moderate the attractiveness effect. Effects of attractiveness also seem to be sustained over time. Boer, Bosker and Werf (2010) conducted a longitudinal study consisting of about 11,000 students over 5 years and found that there was a significant relationship between teacher expectation bias and student performance after 5 years, such that higher expectation by teachers led to sustained higher performance.
Given the consistent and sustained impact of these expectations, the focus of concern has been the accuracy of the expectations themselves. Social psychologists typically argue that teachers’ perceptions of students are usually inaccurate and that “teachers’ expectancies influence students’ academic performance to a greater degree than students’ performance influences teachers’ expectancies” (Miller & Turnbull, 1986, p. 236 ). Alvidrez and Weinstein (1999) provide an example of potentially inaccurate expectations influencing academic performance. They found that teacher expectancies formed of children as young as four years old significantly predicted high school performance 14 years later, beyond students’ measured IQ.
In contrast, educational psychologists have argued that teachers’ expectancies can be accurate (Hoge & Coladarci, 1989), and that inaccurate impressions are typically corrected when more dependable performance information becomes available (e.g., Brophy, 1985; Jussim, 1986, 1989). Essentially, the influence of the expectancy effect works through a self-fulfilling prophecy. If, however, the ‘prophecy’ was based on accurate information, the outcome is likely to reflect correctly perceived ability instead of inaccurate expectations. Jussim and Harber (2005) put it best by pointing out that “as accuracy increases, the potential for self-fulfilling prophecies declines; as accuracy decreases, the potential for self-fulfilling prophecies increases” (p.138). Nonetheless, it is clear that, even if later corrected, initial expectations can play an important role and ratings of facial attractiveness are a known source of initial impression formation (Bar, Neta & Linz, 2006; Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren & Hall, 2005; Willis & Todorov, 2006; Zebrowitz, 2004). Langlois, Ritter, Casey and Sawin (1995) found that even maternal interactions (where familiarity is clearly high) are more positive with attractive children compared to unattractive children. Attractiveness judgments themselves are surprisingly consistent across observers: a meta-analytic review by Langlois et al. (2000) found high inter-rater reliability regarding opinions of facial attractiveness for both men and women, as well as across different countries.

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