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ARE EXPECTATIONS OF TEACHERS A \"SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY\"?Robert Rosenthal, a Professor of Psychology at UC Riverside, and Lenore Jacobsen, a former principal of an elementary school in the South San Francisco Unified School District, explored the concept of interpersonal self-fulfilling prophecies in their 1968 book. They hypothesized that one person's expectation for another person's behavior could unwittingly become a more accurate prediction simply because it was made. To test this hypothesis, they conducted an experiment in which 20 percent of the children in an elementary school were randomly selected and reported to their teachers as showing unusual potential for intellectual growth. Eight months later, these "magic" children showed significantly greater gains in IQ than the remaining children who had not been singled out. The change in the teachers' expectations had led to an actual change in the intellectual performance of the randomly selected children. The researchers also found that the gains made by the pupils of the teacher who held favorable expectations were maintained after promotion to a new teacher who had no special expectations about the children's performance. However, they admitted that a reasonable theory could be proposed to explain the results, namely that the children's IQs were affected only because the teachers treated the special children differently during the test-taking period. While a number of factors weakened the plausibility of this explanation, it could not be disproven. The central thesis of the book was that one person's expectation for another's behavior could serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Although the book was once considered "THE FINAL WORD" in teacher training programs, time has diminished the assuredness of its conclusions, and its methodology has been severely questioned. Nevertheless, it remains a crucial book for anyone interested in educational theory.
