Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupil's Intellectual Development

The anticipatory expectations of teachers towards children's intellectual ability has a significant impact on children's actual intellectual growth, argues this book. The authors review supportive evidence from the literature and present the results of their own experiment. In their study, teachers were led to believe that 20% of their students, randomly selected, were likely to show an intellectual "spurt" in the coming year. The authors argue that the selected children showed considerably more intellectual growth than their peers. The implications of the study should be obvious to those worried about the effects of race, class, and gender in the classroom. This is a paperbound reprint of the 1992 expanded edition. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR