Pygmalion effect
From Freepedia
The Pygmalion effect (also known as Rosenthal effect) is a finding that people tend to behave as you expect they will.
Oak School study
In a study by two psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968), published in their book Pygmalion in the Classroom, the experimenters told teachers that twenty percent of the children in a certain school showed unusual potential for intellectual growth. The names of 20 percent of the students were selected randomly, and revealed to the teachers. Eight months later, the chosen children showed significantly greater gains in IQ than the children who hadn't been showered with attention.
One educational reformer concluded:
- "Labeling matters, and the younger the person getting the label is, the more it matters." [1]
James Rhem commented:
- "When teachers expect students to do well and show intellectual growth, they do; when teachers do not have such expectations, performance and growth are not so encouraged and may in fact be discouraged in a variety of ways."
- "How we believe the world is and what we honestly think it can become have powerful effects on how things turn out."
- "Rosenthal acknowledges how frustrating it is to know how powerfully teacher expectation affects student performance and not to know how to immediately use that information to improve teaching across the board." [2]
There is much more on the this study at Hawthorne effect.
Etymology
Rosenthal got the name of his concept from the George Bernard Shaw play, Pygmalion, later popularized by the musical My Fair Lady. The character Henry Higgins believes the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle can be made into a lady. Higgins' belief in her drives her to make it. (The play in turn was named after the ancient myth of Pygmalion and his statue, which the gods brought to life for him.)
See also:
Links
- History of Education: Rosenthal and Jacobson publish Pygmalion in the Classroom - Daniel Schugurensky
