Page 444 - Sociology and You

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Unit 4 Social Institutions
Students who are treated as if they are expected to perform at high levels often do.
Case Study: Pygmalion in the Classroom
Are your beliefs strong enough to affect your feelings or behavior? You have probably experienced how your feelings and behavior change upon receiving new information. A feeling of well-being usually follows learn- ing that you did better on an important math exam than you thought you could. You may even be encouraged enough to study math more enthu- siastically in the future. If your own perceptions can affect your feelings and behavior, is it possible that someone else’s beliefs about you can also influence your feelings and behavior? The idea that this can happen is called the self-fulfilling prophecy. As noted earlier, two social scientists, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1989), studied the self-fulfilling prophecy in a school setting.
For their case study, these researchers chose Oak School, a public el- ementary school located in a predominantly lower-class community. They hypothesized that children whose teacher expected their IQ scores to in- crease would in fact increase their scores more than comparable children whose teacher expected no IQ gains.
At the beginning of the study, a test was given to all of the Oak School students. Although it was falsely advertised as a predictor of academic “blooming” or “spurt- ing,” it was actually a non-verbal intelligence test. Rosenthal and Jacobson subsequently identified for the teachers 20 percent of the children who allegedly were ready for a dramatic increase in intellectual growth. In fact, the researchers had selected the names of these students by using a table of random num- bers. The difference in poten- tial for academic growth between the children said to