An investigation of the causal effect of educational expectations on school performance. Behavioral consequences, time-stable confounding, or reciprocal causality?

Educational expectations are core concepts in the sociology of education. In this study, we are interested in the potential behavioral consequences of expectations on school performance in early secondary education. The existing literature leads to contradictory hypotheses regarding the causal effect of expectations on achievement. On the one hand, expectations could act as cognitions steering individual behavior towards the attainment of a...