Tuesday, 22 January 2008
>> Add-a-knowledge season 2!
season 2 is back cos cable is back, but before that found something to share with everyone, esp those who might wanna be in the education field in future.
recently there was this issue mentioned in the papers abt a secondary school principal asking the sec 4 students to go ITE instead of gg sec 5 cos they were unlikely to score well in the O levels. this annoyed some parents and hence they reported to the papers.
i dun wanna comment on the issue itself since im not a sec 4 student nor a principal. the straits time today had a commentary on this and the author mentioned that 6 out of 7 teachers she interviewed did not know abt this thing called the
Rosenthal Effect.Essentially, the
Rosenthal Effect is that if the teachers expect students to do well, they will do well. this arose from an experiment that the person did on students, called the
Oak School Study. do take some time to read abt the experiment in wiki below or today's Straits Times. here's wat i found through wikipedia:
The Pygmalion effect, Rosenthal effect, or more commonly known as the "teacher-expectancy effect" refers to situations in which students perform better than other students simply because they are expected to do so. The Pygmalion effect requires a student to internalise the expectations of their superiors. It is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, and in this respect, students with poor expectations internalise their negative label, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly.Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968/1992) report and discuss the Pygmalion effect at length. [1] In their study, they showed that if teachers were led to expect enhanced performance from some children, then the children did indeed show that enhancement. In some cases such improvement was about twice that shown by other children in the same class.
The purpose of the experiment was to support the hypothesis that reality can be influenced by the expectations of others. This influence can be beneficial as well as detrimental depending on which label an individual is assigned. The observer-expectancy effect, which involves an experimenter's unconsciously biased expectations, is tested in real life situations. Rosenthal posited that biased expectancies can essentially affect reality and create self-fulfilling prophecies as a result.
In this experiment, Rosenthal predicted that, when given the information that certain students are brighter than others, elementary school teachers may unconsciously behave in ways that facilitate and encourage the students’ success. The prior research that motivated this study was done in 1911 by psychologists regarding the case of Clever Hans, a horse that gained notoriety because it was supposed to be able to read, spell, and solve math problems by using its hoof to answer. Many skeptics suggested that questioners and observers were unintentionally signaling Clever Hans. For instance, whenever Clever Hans was asked a question the observers' demeanor usually elicited a certain behavior from the subject that in turn confirmed their expectations.
Although not of central importance here, of huge importance in educational research in general is the issue of teacher effects. Tim O'Shea has said that in all studies where one of the variables was the teacher, the effect of different teachers was always bigger than the effect of different treatments (usually the actual subject to be studied). Basically, teachers have a huge effect, but it's poorly understood.
Oak School Study:In a study by two psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968), published in their book Pygmalion in the Classroom, the experimenters told teachers that twenty percent of the children in a certain school showed unusual potential for intellectual growth. The names of 20 percent of the students were selected randomly, and revealed to the teachers. Eight months later, the chosen children showed significantly greater gains in IQ than the children who had not been showered with attention.well, the point here is, teachers do play a part in changing lives, as mentioned by the author of the article. but how they change is important, either for the better or the worse.
now stayed tuned for better stuff coming up haha... will begin to watch my cable tonight...
7:56:00 pm;
