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The Mind of the Educator

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The Palgrave International Handbook of Alternative Education

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Abstract

In 1965, social psychologist Robert Rosenthal and school principal Lenore Jacobson conducted a classroom experiment to test how teachers’ expectations might affect the intellectual development of their pupils (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966). They administered the authoritatively sounding “Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition” to the pupils of Jacobson’s elementary school, telling teachers that the test identified which children were likely to undergo an academic “growth spurt” in the coming year. Yet, in reality the administered test was a standard IQ test and the children designated as intellectual bloomers were selected at random. When pupils were given the same test at the end of the school year, the bloomers showed significantly greater gains in IQ scores than the control group. The results seemed to confirm that teachers’ expectations could affect the intellectual development of pupils and act as an educational self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton, 1948).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Where expectations are the result of natural teacher–pupil interactions, rather than experimentally induced.

  2. 2.

    This particular effect of teacher expectations (expectancy–confirmation bias or biased perception) differs from the self-fulfilling prophecy effect. The former occurs in the mind of the teacher, whereas the latter occurs because of an actual change of behaviour in the student. The effect of expectancy–confirmation bias can be seen in the consistent finding that teacher expectations predict student grades more strongly than they predict standardised test scores (Jussim, 2008). Teachers assign grades but not standardised test scores, and therefore this difference likely reflects expectancy–confirmation bias in their evaluation of students.

  3. 3.

    See Popper & Notturno, 1994.

  4. 4.

    The emphasis is on internal consistency. What seems inconsistent to an outsider may not be perceived as inconsistent by the person in question.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Informatics, King’s College London, London, UK

    Kris De Meyer

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  1. Kris De Meyer
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Correspondence to Kris De Meyer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Newman University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Helen E. Lees

  2. Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Nel Noddings

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De Meyer, K. (2016). The Mind of the Educator. In: Lees, H., Noddings, N. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Alternative Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-41291-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-41291-1_2

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