Rosenthal And The Pygmalion Effect
Overview
Educational quality has been a concern for educators, parents and students for a long period of time. When the Coleman Report was published (Coleman, Campbell, Hobson, McPartland, Mood, Weinfeld, & York, 1966) an interpretation was made that differences in teachers and their behaviors had little to no impact on student performance. Rather the impact comes from teacher’s expectations of their students. Teacher expectations are inferences’ (based on prior experiences or information) about the level of student performance likely to occur in the future (Brophy & Good, 1970; Good & Brophy, 2000).
Historical Background
For 30 years it has been known that some teachers act differently around those students who they believe to be more or less capable (Brophy & Good, 1970). The debate on self-fulfilling prophecies in the educational context has discussed in the social (Merton, 1948) and psychological sciences (Clark, 1963). In the late 1960s and 1970s social scientists and policy makers began arguing or the power of the environment in impacting human performance and learning. Also, the mid-1960s was a decade where low intelligence did not need to be tolerated which was generated largely by Skinnerian behaviorism.
Rosenthal (1985) provided a thorough review of early research on expectancies including Ebbinghaus’ (1885/1913) observation that early trials in an experiment can be a cause of self-fulfilling prophecies and Rice’s (1929) classic study of how researcher’s beliefs influenced interview responses about the causes of poverty.
The Pygmalion Project
A landmark experiment, called the Pygmalion Effect, performed by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson in 1968 describes this impact. This theory is also known now as the self-fulfilling prophecy. Rosenthal (1968) noted that the classic experiment will speak to the “question of whether a teacher’s expectation or her pupils’ intellectual competence can...
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