Rosenthal And Jacobson's Study

Dana Smith Education

Rosenthal and Jacobson’s study in my opinion was a really simple, but brilliant way of proving the effect of a teacher’s expectations for a child can heavily impact how they succeed. Rosenthal and Jacobson picked a 5th grade class and administered an IQ test. No matter the results they chose 1/5th of the class and told the teacher that those specific kids were smarter than the rest of the class “based on the test” which actually was not true. At the end of the same school year the IQ test was repeated and the results showed that the same 1/5th of the class that was picked at random, this time did actually have higher test scores than the rest. The study caused the opinion of the teacher to change about these particular