Define educational self-fulfilling prophecies, and discuss how teacher bias affects students

What will be an ideal response?

Educational self-fulfilling prophecies are the effects of teachers' positive or negative views on the level of students' achievements. Teachers do not interact in the same way with all children. Well-behaved, high-achieving students typically get more encouragement and praise, whereas unruly students have more conflicts with teachers and receive more criticism from them. Once teachers' attitudes toward students are established, they can become more extreme than is warranted by students' behavior.
As early as first grade, teachers' beliefs in children's ability to learn predict students' year-end achievement progress after controlling for students' beginning-of-year performance. This effect is particularly strong when teachers emphasize competition and publicly compare children, regularly favoring the best students.
Teacher expectations have a greater impact on low-achieving than high-achieving students. When a teacher is critical, high achievers can fall back on their history of success. Low-achieving students' sensitivity to self-fulfilling prophecies can be beneficial when teachers believe in them. But biased teacher judgments are usually slanted in a negative direction. In one study, African-American and Hispanic elementary school students taught by high-bias teachers (who expected them to do poorly) showed substantially lower end-of-year achievement than their counterparts taught by low-bias teachers.