Pygmalion Effect

Hello everyone

I'm about to explain the pygmalion effect, in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform. We can also talk about the expectations in life, work, school, sports, relationships and events in the daily life.


As an example I'm going to base on teachers with a short feedback.

Rosenthal has researched the pygmalion issue for many years and has find some interesting facts. He performerd a study at an elemntary school ina a lower-middle class neighbourhood in the US. He took the children in grades q to 6 were given a satandrd IQ TEST at the beggining of the school year, the teachers were told that it was a test of Inflected Acquisition provided by Harvard University and that the test was designed to predict academic blooming. So students that had the higher scores on the test were ready to bloom academically and would progress in the coming year.

After that, teachers received a list with the names of their students who were in the top of 20% on the test. The names were random and the children that were there had'nt done better than the others.
When teachers expect greater development from some children, this children show greater performance.


Rosenthal defines 4 key factors which drive this Pygmalion effect:

1) Climate factor: teachers who expect more of certain students tend to create a warmer climate for those children, both verbally and non verbally (for example, they will smile more often at them).

2) Input factor: teachers will tend to teach more material to children they think are smarter

3) Response opportunity factor: children who are expected to bloom academicallly get more chance to respond.

4) Feedback factor: if more is expected of a child, he/she gets praised more when he/she is right but gets more differentiated feedback when he/she makes a mistake. Children who are not expected to perform get less feedback when they are wrong because teachers would seem to think that the children in question would not understand the correction and so the teachers spend less time trying to correct them.

In conclusion the experiment shows that the result of the children for whom the teachers had expected greater intellectual growth averaged significantly greater improvement than the others.

At work this four key factors also appear, consciously or unconsciously bosses adopt behaviours which may drive succes for some and failures for others.

Pygmalion effect has to mean "you get what you expect", if we expect somethign to happen, our expectation will tend to male it so.

To finish here is a video about Learning Behaviour on Students.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Busqueda de imagenes Google. http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTn8uSSSH58swKiTXgi8RiNBk3eHJIRwtfm05BASUrCw_992As&t=1&usg=__r3XQ3BMhXjvNIruWJbvUJCdNqwc=

Josephnoone. The Pygmalion effect: expect the worst and we most likely will get it!. posted on 11/11/2009 from http://josephnoone.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/the-pygmalion-effect-what-you-expect-as-a-manager-is-what-you-get-in-terms-of-results/
YouTube. Learning Behaviour.