FIELD EXPERIMENTS

Question 1

Rosenthal and Jacobson’s (1968) ‘Pygmalion in the Classroom’

Answer 1

• Conducted research in California primary school ‘Oak School’ to examine effect of teachers exp on pupil performance - given an IQ test + teachers were told this enabled researchers to identify 20% of pupils who were likely to ‘spurt’ in next year
• In reality, pupils were selected at random so no reason to expect their performance would be diff to others in the class unless teacher exp had an influence
• Pupils were retested 8 months later + again after further year; over first 8 months, pupils gained on average 8 IQ points, but ‘spurters’ gained 12 points
• greatest improvement in performance was found in youngest children, aged 6-8 - after a further year, this ‘expectancy adv’ only seemed to have an effect among 10-11 year olds

Question 2

Claiborn (1969)

Answer 2

found no evidence of teacher exp being passed on thru classroom interaction