In this video I discuss Rosenthal and Jacobson’s “Pygmalion in the Classroom” study on teacher expectations and student improvement as well as school tracking, the stability of IQ scores, Carol Dweck’s research on fixed and growth mindsets, and distinctions between fluid and crystallized intelligence when considering the possibility of improvement.
Rosenthal & Jacobson “Pygmalion in the Classroom” original paper: https://www.uni-muenster.de/imperia/m…
Carol Dweck on Mindset (TED): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X0mg…
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to look at the role of expectations on IQ scores. So we have the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy and this refers to a situation in which an expectation actually causes the expected result to occur.
Now we saw an example of this in the unit on research methods because I talked about a study by Robert Rosenthal and Kermit Fode, in which college students were given rats to run in some mazes and the students were told that some of the rats were maze-bright rats and some were maze-dull rats. And after running the rats in these mazes, the students found that the bright rats outperformed the dull rats. Now this wouldn’t be surprising except that the rats were actually randomly distributed. There were no bright or dull rats and this meant that the difference in performance was likely due to the differing expectations that students had about the rats.
So this was a good demonstration of observer bias and in this video we’re going to take a look at the role of teacher expectations on student performance. And this brings us to another study conducted by Robert Rosenthal, and here’s a picture of Rosenthal here. And in this study he collaborated with an elementary school principal Lenore Jacobson and what Rosenthal and Jacobson did was they gave all of the students at a California elementary school a test at the beginning of the school year.
Now they said that the test was the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition and the idea was this was a test that could identify which students were most likely to improve in the coming year. And so after this test they gave teachers a list of the 20% of students who were most likely to make quick improvements in the coming year; they were likely to spurt in their development. So we had this 20% of students who are identified to be “spurters” by this test and then at the end of the school year, eight months later, the students took the test again.
Now the test was not actually the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition, that was a made-up name. It was actually an IQ test. It was a test by JC Flanagan called the Test of General Ability or the TOGA test, which assesses verbal IQ as well as abstract reasoning IQ. And so what Rosenthal and Jacobson wanted to see was whether there was a difference between these 20% spurter students and the rest of the students at the school. And these 20% of students were actually randomly selected. So there was no test for identifying which students were going to bloom, they just randomly picked 20% of students and told the teachers “hey these are the kids to watch for; these kids are going to improve a lot this year” and then they wanted to see, did those differing expectations of the teachers actually have an influence on the retest at the end of the year?
And turns out that they did. The students who were identified as being “spurters”, who were likely to make the most gains in that school year, actually did improve more than the rest of the students. So those 20% of spurters showed greater improvement and this was especially true for the younger grades. So this effect was strongest for students in grade one and the effect was not really there by grade six. So this suggests that it could be the case that students have a reputation that sort of follows them. And so the grade one students don’t have any prior reputation with the teachers and so these expectations might be stronger, and by grade six maybe they’re weakened a bit.
Or it could be the case that students who are younger are more susceptible to teacher influence. So the expectations teachers have play a greater role on influencing those students. Or it could be the case that teachers themselves vary, so that grade one teachers and the expectations they have are acted out differently than than they are for grade six teachers, let’s say. But in any case, we do see this measurable difference in the students who were identified as being “spurters” compared to the other students. And there was also a slight difference between boys and girls in terms of whether their verbal IQ improved, which was more likely for boys to occur, and their abstract reasoning, which actually improved more in girls who were identified as being these “spurters”. But the point is that teacher expectations were influencing the results on the subsequent test. So why might this be?
Well, it could be the case that teachers behaved differently towards these students. So teachers might call on students who they believe have greater potential more often. Or perhaps they’ll encourage them more persistently. If the student starts struggling, the teacher thinks, you know, this kid can do it, you know? I know that he has the potential and so they might focus a little bit more of their efforts on helping these students to improve. Whereas other students who weren’t considered to have this potential for improvement might not receive as much attention.
So this brings us to the idea that students experience different environments even when they’re in the same classroom with the same teacher. The teacher’s behavior might change slightly from student to student and this could have an impact on the students abilities. Now we can also think of more extreme differences in student environments when we think about the practice of tracking that schools engage in. And tracking refers to the idea that students are placed into groups based on early performance. So students who are identified to have the greatest potential or the greatest achievement so far are placed in sort of the top class and students who are struggling are placed into a lower track.
And then the question is well, how do we focus our limited resources that we have? So it might be the case that teachers are going to focus more of their energy on the top performing groups or schools are going to maybe allocate more of their budget to the top level classes. And the lower tracks might be seen as sort of a lost cause, not really worth the effort. This actually brings us back to a controversy in part of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in that they suggested that the right thing to do is to focus on the top tracks because those are people with higher IQ, have greater potential, and it makes more sense to invest your resources in them and that investing your resources in lower performing groups is sort of a waste of time because they’re unlikely to improve.
So we might consider interventions that are designed to do just that; to focus on lower groups and see if you can spur improvements in those groups. And so we can consider programs like the Head Start Program. This is a program that’s aimed at young struggling students and the goal is to help them to catch up and reach their fullest potential and the Head Start program is successful in the short-term. So these students do actually make some rapid improvements. But unfortunately, other students catch up to them very quickly or even surpass them, and so it doesn’t seem to be a long-term effective, it doesn’t seem to have long-term effectiveness for these groups. So we might wonder just how much should we invest in these programs if the effects dissipate over time.
So while there are positive effects of programs like the Head Start program these effects dissipate over time. So then we might ask well, maybe there’s a way we could maintain them. How could we maintain the effects of these types of programs or is it not possible? Should we think of them as sort of a one-shot approach, right? We do this program and hope for a long-term benefit, or maybe that’s not possible. That’s sort of like the holy grail of IQ improvement, is to have a short-term intervention that has long-lasting effects. And so far it seems that that isn’t something that we can really do.
So this brings us to the question of how stable IQ is. Now all of the students in the school that I mentioned in Rosenthal and Jacobson study actually made improvements over the course of the year and that might make us wonder about how much are we really assessing IQ in this case, because maybe the improvements were were too great for it to be really measuring their IQ versus their achievement. So it did include, parts of the test include things like vocabulary, which of course you can always expand your vocabulary but does that mean you’re improving your IQ? But that sort of goes back to our problem of how we define IQ. So the question is, how stable is IQ? Is it possible for us to make long-term improvements in IQ?
And this brings us to some research by Carol Dweck on what she calls fixed versus growth mindsets. This is an idea that’s been really popular in education in the past couple years and the idea is that people who have a fixed mindset believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable. So the idea of a fixed mindset is that your abilities are innate and you can’t really do much about it. So they’re innate and they’re stable; they don’t change. This is in contrast to a growth mindset, which is the idea that abilities are malleable that you can change them with the appropriate amount of effort. So we might wonder well how true is this?
Well it depends on what abilities we’re talking about. And this brings up the point that Dweck has actually written about, sort of the misapplication of her idea of fixed and growth mindsets. Because people, some teachers and some school systems, have been applying it as if you have one mindset; fixed or growth. And obviously we want growth, so we’re just going to tell all the students to have a growth mindset and she says that’s not really what it’s about. Because this mindset exists for any ability you might consider. So you might have a fixed mindset in one area and a growth mindset in another. You might think of your athletic ability as being fixed and unchangeable, whereas you might have a more growth mindset when it comes to thinking about your math ability. And so the idea is you can’t use sort of in one-step develop a growth mindset for all of your abilities. And when we think about whether or not our abilities are stable or changeable we might think about sort of a range of potential. So I might think of my athletic ability as being relatively fixed in that I’m not going to suddenly become an Olympic athlete, but maybe there’s improvements that I can make. So maybe I can still have a growth mindset while recognizing that, you know, there’s a limit to how much I might be able to improve certain aspects of that ability.
And this brings us to think about IQ in terms of well, do we think of IQ as being innate and stable or more malleable? And I mentioned that it’s really hard to find short-term IQ interventions that seemed to raise IQ for the long term. But maybe this brings us to consider the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence that I’ve mentioned in a previous video. So this is an idea from Raymond Cattell; the idea is that your fluid IQ is your ability to solve new problems versus your crystallized intelligence refers to knowledge that you’ve accumulated over time. And if we think about the stability of IQ in this way it seems to be the case that fluid IQ is very, very difficult to change. There’s there’s not really any strong evidence suggesting that we can change fluid IQ over the long term. This is something I’ll talk about in a future video.
But crystallized intelligence seems sort of obvious that you can improve that. You can always accumulate new knowledge and new skills even if your fluid intelligence is fairly low. And maybe it’s sort of, you’re kind of slow at learning new skills, you can still learn them but it’s going to take a lot of effort. And so we might think about the growth mindset as being useful when we’re thinking about crystallized intelligence; we’re thinking about specific skills and specific knowledge that we can accumulate over time. And that seems to be much less stable over time. You can always improve that.
You can improve your vocabulary and when we look at people over time crystallized intelligence improves throughout most of your life whereas fluid intelligence remains fairly stable and then it actually begins to decline beginning in your 30s. But we don’t notice this decline because your crystallized intelligence makes up for it, because it’s always improving. So that might be a way we could think about it when we when, we talk about the idea that IQ is fairly stable and unchanging. We might think of that as just specifically being about fluid IQ and not giving up hope and saying well then I can’t learn anything new or I can’t make improvement because certainly you can improve your crystallized intelligence. So even though we don’t have evidence for, you know, long-lasting change in fluid intelligence, it doesn’t mean that you can’t make improvements and you can’t acquire new skills. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
