Self-fulfilling prophecies: A theoretical and integrative review.

Self-fulfilling prophecies have become a major area of research for social, personality, developmental, and educational psychologists. This article reviews classroom self-fulfilling prophecies in terms of three sequential stages: (a) Teachers develop expectations, (b) teachers treat students differently depending on their expectations, and (c) students react to this treatment in expectancy-confirming ways. The focus of the review is on the social and psychological events occurring at each of these stages, the causal processes linking one stage to the next, and the conditions limiting the occurrence of self-fulfilling prophecies. Finally, it provides a theoretical framework for both understanding past research and guiding future research on self-fulfilling prophecies. This article presents a model of the social and psychological processes underlying self-fulfilling prophecies in the classroom. In general, the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy refers to situations in which one person's expectations about a second person lead the second person to act in ways that confirm the first person's original expectation. When applied to classrooms, the self-fulfilling prophecy refers to situations in which a teacher's