Rosenthal and Jacobson
("Pygmalion In The Classroom")

Rosenthal and Jacobson were interested in studying low educational achievement by Mexican children (an idea that we can link in with the concept of educational achievement generally). In particular, they wanted to try and isolate the causes of under-achievement by these children and they could have looked at such ideas as:

• Mexican children being innately more or less intelligent than their peers.
  Physical environmental factors (lighting, heating, possible overcrowding. etc.) having some unknown effect upon behaviour.
  Whether or not the teaching staff were competent, well-motivated, etc.
  The home background of the children somehow affecting their behaviour,
  

In short, any number of things might have existed to cause the observed behaviour.

Rosenthal and Jacobson decided to test the proposition that some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy was involved and they believed the key to understanding differential educational achievement was behaviour of the children's teachers.

In order to test their hypothesis that the behaviour of teachers (in terms of their expectations about their pupils' intellectual ability) was a crucial factor Rosenthal and Jacobson posed as psychologists who could, on the basis of a sophisticated IQ test, identify children who would in the future display "dramatic intellectual growth". They administered their test and identified to the class teacher those pupils who, on the basis of objective IQ testing would subsequently develop greater academic achievements than their peers.

After to gap of a few months, Rosenthal and Jacobson returned and re-tested the children. They found that those who had been identified to teachers as possessing "academic potential" had improved their IQ scores significantly whereas the "non-achievers" in the class had not. The one significant thing Rosenthal and Jacobson did not tell the teacher was that they had selected the names of "potential achievers" at random, not on the basis of a new and highly sophisticated test.

By introducing a relatively controlled element into the classroom interaction between teachers and pupils, Rosenthal and Jacobson were able to test their hypothesis and demonstrate that the expectations held by teachers about their pupils was a significant factor in the intellectual development (or lack of same) of those pupils.