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Teachers’ expectations, acting as a self-fulfilling prophecy, has been found to be influential on students’ outcomes (e.g., Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; Good, et al., 2018, Rubie-Davies et al., 2020) and motivation (Murdock-Perriera & Sedlacek, 2018). Student perceptions play a key role in this process (Rubie-Davies, 2008; Gilbert, 2014). Teachers communicate their expectations to students through differential behaviours, and students’ awareness of this differential treatment can contribute to differential outcomes (Good, et al., 2018; Weinstein, 2018). Hence, this project involved three studies to explore teacher expectation effects in Chinese classrooms in senior high school in Mainland China. Specifically, Study One explored the formation of Mandarin Chinese teachers’ expectations of their students. This study was designed to classify Chinese teachers into high-, average- and low-expectation teachers, and identified the underlying teacher-related factors that led to the formation of Chinese teachers’ expectations, and if teachers believed that their expectations affected students’ performance. Study Two aimed to investigate student perceptions of teacher expectations, and how it related to teachers’ actual expectations. Finally, Study Three explored student motivation as an outcome of teacher expectations. The student data for studies Two and Three was analysed to understand whether student perceptions and motivation were related to student characteristics, such as ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status does. In additon, the results of Study Three was connected to the findings of Studies One and Two to investigate in what ways, if any, the motivation of students whose teachers had high expectations developed differently from those of students whose teachers had low expectations, as well as the relations, if any, between student motivation, teacher expectations, and student perceptions of these expectations.