New Century Teacher Role Reshaping - The Foundation of Teacher Development

Author: Shen Jiliang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: Pygmalion was a skilled sculptor in ancient Cyprus who once created a statue of a young girl. Due to their daily encounters, he gradually fell in love with the statue. Pygmalion poured all his passion and hope into his sculpture, which moved the god of love and, in the end, brought the statue to life. So, how did this king from Greek mythology become connected to psychology? In 1968, American psychologist Robert Rosenthal and others conducted a study in an elementary school. The experiment was carried out as follows: They first administered an intelligence test to students in grades one through six and told the teachers it was a "test to predict children's future development." Then, they randomly selected 20% of the students, not based on the results of the intelligence test. They informed the teachers of these selected students that they had great potential for development. A few months later, when they administered the intelligence test again to the students in these six grades, they found that the students labeled as having great potential showed higher IQs compared to other students, and the teachers evaluated them as "highly curious." The researchers discovered that this situation was extremely similar to the dramatic changes brought about by Pygmalion's expectations, so they borrowed from the ancient Greek legend to name the phenomenon where teachers' expectations lead to student changes as the "Pygmalion Effect," also known as the "Rosenthal Effect" or the "Expectancy Effect."