Pygmalion Effect

The Pygmalion Effect, also known as the self-fulfilling prophecy, signifies a positive impact in the field of curriculum studies and raises the issue of whether high educational expectations by school personnel (i.e., teachers, staff, and administrators) and school partners (i.e., parents/guardians and others in the community) make the outcome of student success in school more likely to occur than would otherwise have been true. The term, Pygmalion Effect, as it relates to schooling, was coined by the Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal and the elementary school principal Lenore Jacobson in their book, Pygmalion in the Classroom, published in 1968. The implications of their study, which took place in a low-income San Francisco neighborhood, suggest that compensatory education needed to be centered on the induction of positive expectancies in teachers where there previously existed negative expectations.

The Pygmalion theme of becoming educated has regularly reoccurred in English literature. English playwright, George Bernard Shaw's play, Pygmalion, is probably the most familiar version of the original classical myth contained in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The Pygmalion Effect represents not merely an idea, but also a uniquely U.S. mythos: Despite our race, social class, gender, our previous experiences, and even our test scores, the road to success is ultimately paved with the power of positive thinking.

Students bring a collection of dispositions to the curriculum. Backgrounds, values, standards, linguistic codes, and worldviews of middle-class and upper-class children are often more analogous with those of the curriculum. The hidden curriculum, [Page 701]namely, the socialization of oppression and sense of inferiority or defectiveness in the minds of students, underscores academic and educational evolution.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, school personnel and school partners inform students what their curricular expectations are by exhibiting thousands of cues from the language they use to the body language they communicate with. If expectations can create reality, there is an enormous incentive to have high curricular expectations of the students in school personnel's and school partner's spheres of influence. By communicating in a manner that will enable students to be their best, school personnel and school partners affect students, and it does not matter if the child is actually “smart.”

Within curricular discourses, the Pygmalion Effect has been widely understood (if not practiced) by educators for decades. During the civil rights era of the mid-20th century, school desegregation activists realized that simply changing the social organization of schools and the curriculum would have little effect on the achievement of students of color and working-class poor students unless a concomitant change occurred in the minds of school personnel and school partners. Moreover, activists pointed out that disadvantaged children did not possess some problem or have some deficit that needed remediation, but that changing the attitude of school personnel and school partners toward disadvantaged children would be more effective.

The Pygmalion Effect in schooling and curriculum suggests that compensatory education needs to be centered on the induction of positive expectancies in school personnel and school partners. The notion that school personnel's and school partners' low expectations for minority students cause them to do poorly in school and the notion that the creation of a highly positive attitude about students in the minds of school personnel and school partners causes positive effects has been widely researched. As a result of this research, interesting curricular patterns of student behavior and learning resulting from the Pygmalion Effect include students volunteering more answers, initiating more contact with their teachers, raising their hands more often, and having fewer reading problems than their low expectation peers do.

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