Volume 11, Number 4 · September 12, 1968
Great Expectations
By Herbert R Kohl
Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils' Intellectual Development
by Robert Rosenthal, by Lenore Jacobson
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 240 pp., $4.95
On the Outskirts of HOPE: Educating Youth from Poverty Areas
by Helaine S. Dawson
McGraw-Hill, 329 pp., $5.95
Most educational research focuses upon the success and failure of students or on the economic 'effectiveness' of school systems. But there seems to be a tacit agreement between teachers and researchers (usually psychologists and sociologists) not to raise questions concerning the teachers themselves. It is difficult for researchers to enter a school to study teacher behavior, and they rarely do so. Yet two researchers, Robert Rosenthal, a psychologist, and Lenore Jacobson, a school administrator, have violated the non-aggression pact between teachers and researchers and studied the manipulation of teacher behavior in the classroom. Pygmalion in the Classroom is a report on the effect of a teacher's expectations upon the performance of his pupils. The study is ingenious and the results obtained highly significant.
Review, 2946 words
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