One of the most important relationships that students will develop within a classroom environment is the student-teacher relationship. The purpose of this study was to explore the student-teacher relationship through examining the effects of teacher expectations on student's motivational beliefs. There are two research questions that this study explored; do teacher expectations affect student motivational beliefs and do teacher expectations affect student motivational level? The three hypotheses were as follows: students who receive low expectations will be more performance goal oriented, students who receive high expectations will be more mastery goal oriented and the level of motivation will be higher for students who receive high expectations vs. students who receive low expectations. All tasks were conducted in an simulated classroom like setting. Each student within the study was randomly assigned into either a low expectation group or a high expectation group. There were four experimental groups (2 low expectations and 2 high expectations) with fifteen students in each group. The data collected was from a primary source. The preliminary results revealed that there was a significant affect of the level of teacher expectations on the student motivational beliefs. Analysis of each individual dependent variable showed that there was a significant difference for students who received low teacher expectations compared to those students who received high teacher expectations. Students who receive low teacher expectations were more performance goal oriented. This study has educational and scientific importance not only for students but for teachers as well. This study added to the motivation literature because it used the goal theory framework with African American population which is currently scarce in the literature. This study also added to the teacher expectation literature because it introduced a new way to study this phenomenon as well as updated the literature base. Moreover, this study could be used to help teachers and students build more positive relationships within the classroom.