Robert Rosenthal Interview

Assignment - Interview with a Theorist

by
Kerone Barnett

Table of Contents 16

Section I - Introduction
Introduction – Dr. Robert Rosenthal, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
"When teachers expect students to do well and show intellectual growth, they do; when teachers do not have such expectations, performance and growth are not so encouraged and may in fact be discouraged in a variety of ways." "How we believe the world is and what we honestly think it can become have powerful effects on how things will turn out." (James Rhem, Executive Editor for the Online National Teaching and Learning Forum, Retrieved from www.wikepedi.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect ).

Robert Rosenthal is currently a Distinguished
I was born in Germany and I left in 1939 to South Africa, and lived in Southern Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe. Then we relocated to New York and I completed elementary and high school there. Then my family moved to Los Angeles. I attended UCLA from 1950 to 1956, completed my Bachelors in 1953 and my got my PhD in Clinical Psychology in 1956. My first job was at the University of North Dakota where I was an Assistant Professor and then I became an Associate Professor. I started a PhD programme in Clinical Psychology at the University of North Dakota and I was there for five years and then I went to Harvard University for 37 years and then moved to Riverside University and I have been here now for 14 years and this Saturday I’ll be eighty years old. So that’s my
All the children at her elementary school were administered a pre-test called the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition, which was a made up name but which was actually a standard IQ Test. We told the teachers that the test would predict academic blooming. The test would tell us which children would grow in IQ points over the next year. We gave each teacher the names of three, four, five or six children in the class that she was going to be getting. We tested at the end of one school year and at the beginning of the next school year we told the teachers which students had scored on the test in such a way to know which ones would bloom intellectually. These names however were chosen from a table of random numbers, so it was completely random and what we found at the end of the school year was that the children, whose names were given, did bloom intellectually, they gained significantly more IQ points than did the children in the control group about who nothing special had been said. So this was the basic Pygmalion