Psychology case study: Rosenthal and Jacobson found lizib 01012014 – Flashcards

A field experiment (socio-cultural)

To investigate how a teacher's expectations of a student's predicted intellectual capabilities influences their performance in school and their IQ levels.

Children from an elementary school in grades 1-6 were selected for this study. Each grade had three classes (above average, average and below average performance). From the total of 18 classes, 20% of students were chosen by random to receive the experimental conditions.

The IV was the expectations of the teachers. The DV was the IQ changes of the children that were participating in this study. A control group was part of the experiment to see how much the initial and final IQ numbers of those that were told that they were about to academically bloom and those that were not have changed over the period of 8 months after first testing.

A non-verbal intelligence test was administered to all the children between the grades 1 and 6 disguised as a test that was able to predict whether a child will academically bloom in the near future. Names of random students were picked (blind-experiment to exclude bias) and reported to teachers as students that are expected to bloom soon in school. Subjects were retested with the same intelligence test after 8 months and results were compared against the control group.

The effects of teachers' expectancies were not uniform across the six grade levels. Grades 1 and 2 experienced the greatest change in IQ levels due to changes in the teachers' expectations (15.4% and 9.5%) In contrast, pupils in grades 5 and 6 were not as strongly affected by their teachers' influence (-0.1% and -0.7%).

A teacher's perception/prediction of their students' capabilities (either conscious or subconscious) does influence their overall scholarly performance which is reflected in their IQ scores and academia. Therefore, this shows that intelligence is not purely dependent on a person's genetics but is also shaped by others' perceptions of them.

There was no researcher bias as students' names for the 'blooming' and 'non-blooming' categories were assigned blindly. However, there was a relative amount of deception involved: parents and students did not know in which category they/their child was in and the intelligence test was not a test that could predict academic blooming. Teachers were deceived with made up data which ended up influencing students' academic performance. Some might argue that this is unethical, however Jacobson and Rosenthal argued that this occurs all the time both intentionally and unintentionally so they were not doing any harm.