Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Case Study

Rosenthal #1 - Rosenthal and Jacobson argue that under most circumstances if students confirm teacher expectations it is difficult to know whether or not this is truly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why, what other interpretations are there? How did they set up their study so that they could clearly tell if self-fulfilling prophecies were operating? Explain how the results confirmed this.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is when the first person has expectations of a second person that leads the second person into performing how the first person expects. Based on Rosenthal and Jacobson’s article argue that it is difficult to know whether or not a teacher’s expectations cause a self-fulfilling prophecy in their students. This can be difficult due to a variety of factors. The reason that this can be difficult to determine is because expectations/interpretations can be shown in a variety of ways and can be based on teacher’s having previous observations of the student or even information provided by a student’s previous teacher. This would provide knowledge on the past performance of these children and could have affected the results if this information had been available. The way the self-fulfilling prophecy was removed from the experiment was to be sure that there was not a way for previous behavior to have been observed and thus could not be predicted. This was done by providing what the teachers thought was accurate information on the students and whether they were expected to be intelligent. This was done by using the Flanagan Tests of General Ability, which was a new intelligence test that the teachers at Oak School knew nothing about. Instead the teachers were told that this test was designed to predict which students would intellectually gain in the next year. The students that were predicted for intellectual gain were randomly selected to remove the chance of a self-fulfilling prophecy. …show more content…
The Hawthorne effect is described as a positive effect due to the attention that is being provided to the subject. In this case the control group at Oak School would have positive results due to the attention being provided by the university researchers, which would have increased the morale of the teachers. What are other possibilities for the results of the control group? The control group could have had parents that were more involved in their kid’s academics where they would teach them at home, parents could have hired tutors, and students from the experiment group could have helped the students in the control group. It was stated in the article that there was no crash course for these students, but what isn’t clear is if they specifically meant by the teachers or if this also included the families. If this did not include the students’ families, then some of the gains of the control group could have been directly attributed to the family or help from the experiment group students. Other conditions that could have been added are that parents weren’t allowed to tutor or hire a tutor their kids at home (seems unlikely most parents would comply), and the control group could have been kept separate from the other students. For example, separate rooms or different sides of the room. Another possibility is that the experimental students could have only been allowed to work with other experimental group students while the control group students could only work with control group