Smith, A., Jussim, L., Eccles, J., VanNoy, M., Madon, S., & Palumbo, P. (1998). Self-fulfilling prophecies, perceptual biases and accuracy at the individual and group level. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 34, 530-561.

We examined ability grouping as a moderator of self-fulfilling prophecies in two ways. First, we examined ability group moderation for individual students with data from 1701 students and 97 teachers from sixth-grade math classes. Second, we examined ability group moderation at the class level with data from 108 sixth-grade math classes. Across both sets of analyses, results showed that: (1) teacher perceptions predicted student achievement primarily because those perceptions were accurate; (2) teacher perceptions biased marks.