The Pygmalion Effect and the Power of Positive Expectations

does it make a difference whether your teacher believes that you are a high performer or a low performer that you are a late bloomer that even though you haven't demonstrated your intellectual ability you know you you will blossom or you're not a good student or you're a good student psychologist Robert Rosenthal and school principal Lenore Jacobson did a remarkable study some years ago in which they told school teachers elementary school teachers that on the basis of some psychological tests some of their students some of the children in their class were designated as late bloomers even though they hadn't shown any academic success they are expected to bloom the amazing thing is that in a very short time the teachers began to treat the children those children differently than the other kids those kids began to think of themselves differently and in the end they actually performed significantly better than the other kids they were transformed by the teachers positive expectations the opposite of Jane Eliot's study in which teaches negative expectations that the teacher infused led them to think of themselves as inferior so let's see the Pygmalion effect in action in his classrooms set up by Rosenthal and Jacobson positive expectations can change a person's perception of a situation just as dramatically as negative expectations psychologists call this the Pygmalion effect after the George Bernard Shaw play of the same name in which even an uneducated ragamuffin can be transformed into a proper society lady in an experiment conducted at an elementary school like this one psychologist Robert Rosenthal and school principal Lenore Jacobson took the Pygmalion effect one step further what we wanted to show was the extent to which teachers expectations could actually affect pupils intellectual performance for example their IQ scores so what we did was we tested everybody in a school with a test that pretended to be a test that would predict academic blooming so called Harvard test of inflected acquisition and allegedly on the basis of that test but not really we gave each of the teachers in the school the names of a handful of children in her classroom that would get smart in the academic year ahead these kids names were taken out of a hat we chose them by means of a table of random numbers the children themselves did not know in any direct way that teachers were holding certain expectations for them teachers were told not to tell the kids and of course we didn't tell that the children either so the children never knew and then when we tested the children a year later we found that those kids who had been alleged to their teachers to be showing or going to show intellectual gains in fact showed greater intellectual gains than did the children of whom we've said nothing in particular so the kids actually got smarter when they were expected to get smarter by their teachers we've come to feel that there are really four factors that operate in the mediation or communication of these self-fulfilling prophecies especially in the classroom but not only in the classroom so what are these four things that teachers tend to do differently to kids for whom they have more favorable expectations the first factor is the climate factor teachers tend to create a warmer climate for those children for whom they have more favorable expectations it is nicer to them both in terms of the things they say and also in the nonverbal channels of communication the other very important factor is the so called input factor that one probably won't surprise anyone teachers teach more material to those kids for whom they have more favorable expectations after all if you think a kid is dumb and can't learn you're not gonna put yourself out to try to teach them very much two other factors though make a difference one is the response opportunity factor that is kids get more of a chance to respond if the teachers expect more of them they call on them more often when they do call on them they let them talk longer and they help and shape with them the answers that the kids speak out kind of working together to put the response out the last is feedback the feedback factor works in this way as you might expect if more is expected of a kid the kid is praised more positively reinforced more for getting a good answer out but interestingly enough is given more differentiated feedback when they get the wrong answer one of the ways in which you can sometimes tell a little bit that the teacher does not have very high expectations for kid is that the teacher is willing to accept a low-quality response or it will really clarify what would have been a good quality response maybe because he or she feels well what's the use the kids not smart enough to profit from this additional clarification so those are the four factors climate input response opportunity and feedback

Channel: HeroicImaginationTV

Views: 555,268

Keywords: education, power of expectations, power of situation, pygmalion effect, school, social influence

Id: hTghEXKNj7g

Length: 5min 52sec (352 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 25 2011