Pygmalion in the Classroom

In 1968, Robert Rosenthal, a Harvard University professor, and Leonore Jacobson, a

Principal of an elementary school in San Francisco, published 'Pygmalion in the classroom:
Teacher expectation and pupils' intellectual development', which eventually would become a
classic in the sociology of education. Put simply, the main argument of the book is that the
expectations that teachers have about their students' behavior can unwittingly influence such
behavior. This influence, or self-fulfilling prophecy, could have a positive or negative impact.
In other words, when teachers expect students to do well, they tend to do well; when teachers
expect students to fail, they tend to fail.
The concept of self-fulfilling prophecy had been introduced to the sociological debate
by Robert Merton in a seminal essay published in the Antioch Review in 1948. In that article,
Merton described a self-fulfilling prophecy as a three-stage process beginning with a person's
belief (false at the time it is held) that a certain event will happen in the future. In the second
stage this expectation, or prophecy, leads to a new behavior that the person would have not
undertake in the absence of such expectation. In the last stage the expected events actually
take place, and the prophecy is fulfilled. One of Merton's examples was the collapse of a solid
and solvent financial institution, the Last National Bank, in the early 1930s. The process
began with the belief, false at that time, that the institution was at the verge of bankrupcy.
That led to a massive withdrawal of savings by panicked depositers, which in turn led to the
actual collapse of the bank.
Rosenthal and Jacobson borrowed the term 'Pygmalion effect' from a play by George
Bernard Shaw ('Pygmalion') in which a professor's high expectations radically transformed
the educational performance of a lower-class girl. 'Pygmalion in the Classroom' describes an
experiment carried out in an elementary school (which the authors call Oak School) to test the
hypothesis that in any given classroom there is a correlation between teachers' expectations
and students' achievement. In the experiment, Rosenthal and Jacobson gave an intelligence
test to all of the students at an elementary school at the beginning of the school year. Then,
they randomly selected 20 percent of the students - without any relation to their test results and reported to the teachers that these 20% of students were showing "unusual potential for
intellectual growth" and could be expected to "bloom" in their academic performance by the
end of the year. Eight months later, at the end of the academic year, they came back and retested all the students. Those labeled as "intelligent" children showed significantly greater
increase in the new tests than the other children who were not singled out for the teachers'
attention. This means that "the change in the teachers' expectations regarding the intellectual
performance of these allegedly 'special' children had led to an actual change in the intellectual
performance of these randomly selected children" (p. viii).
The teachers were also asked to rate students on variables related to intellectual
curiosity, personal and social adjustment, and need for social approval. In what can be
interpreted as a 'benign cycle,' those average children who were expected to bloom
intellectually were rated by teachers as more intellectually curious, happier, and in less need
for social approval.
For ethical reasons, the Oak School experiment only focused on favorable or positive
expectations and their impact on intellectual competence, but it is reasonable to infer that
unfavorable expectations could also lead to a corresponding decrease in performance. Often,
these negative expectations are based on appearences and other factors that have little to do
with actual intellectual ability:

There are many determinants of a teacher's expectation of her pupils' intellectual ability.
Even before a teacher has seen a pupil deal with academic tasks she is likely to have some
expectation for his behavior. If she is to teach a 'slow group,' or children of darker skin color,
or children whose mothers are 'on welfare,' she will have different expectations for her pupils'
performance than if she is to teach a 'fast group,' or children of an upper-middle-class
community. Before she has seen a child perform, she may have seen his score on an
achievement or ability test or his last years' grades, or she may have access to the less formal
information that constitutes the child's reputation. (p. viii).
Rosenthal and Jacobson's study and subsequent research (see below) confirmed that
teachers' expectations matter, that student labeling is often done on arbitrary and biased
grounds, and suggested that through the hidden curriculum teachers can, consciously or
unconsciously, reinforce existing class, ethnic and gender inequalities. This is done by
creating a classroom atmosphere in which some students are systematically encouraged to
succeed whereas others are systematically disencouraged, reproducing in the classroom the
social cycle of advantages and disadvantages. It also implies, conversely (and this has
important policy implications), that a change in teachers expectations can lead to an
improvement in intellectual performance from those who are usually expected to achieve the
least.
Although many people had suspected for years that teachers' expectations have an
impact on students' performance, 'Pygmalion in the classroom' was one the first studies
providing clear evidence to document this hypothesis. If we agree, based on this evidence,
that a relation between teachers' expectation and the performance of certain students, then a
subsequent question arises: How, specifically, do teachers influence a higher achievement of
those average students arbitrarily labeled as 'intellectually superior'? In other words, what are
the specific classroom mechanisms by which a teacher's expectations actually translates into a
gain in performance? Because the Oak School experiment did not attempt to examine this
issue, it did not provide conclusive evidence on this, but suggested that a combination of
subtle changes in teaching strategies and communication patterns (e.g. teachers paying more
attention and giving more encouragement and positive reinforcement to the children from
whom more gains were expected) took place during the academic year and played an
important role in effecting student performance.
'Pygmalion in the classroom' was followed by many other school-based studies that
examined these mechanisms in detail from different perspectives. Prominent among the works
on this subject conducted by U.S. scholars are "Student social class and teacher expectations:
the self-fulfilling prophecy in ghetto education" (Ray Rist 1970), "Social class and the hidden
curriculum of work" (Jean Anyon 1980), "Keeping track: How schools structure inequality"
(Jeannie Oakes 1984), and "Failing at fairness: How America's schools cheat girls" (Myra
Sadker and David Sadker 1995).
Although Rosenthal and Jacobson's work has received several methodological and
theoretical criticisms, their pioneering and imaginative research on the Oak School certainly
opened a 'black box' in the empirical study of equality of educational opportunity, and
provided a lasting contribution to the field.
References:
Merton, R.K. (1948). The self-fulfilling prophecy. Antioch Review, pp. 193-210.
Rosenthal, R., and Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation and pupils' intellectual
development'. New York: Rinehart and Winston.