Lee Jussim
Lee Jussim is a social psychologist at Rutgers University and the first author of the 2005 review that remains the standard summary of what teacher expectations do. Its conclusion is that classroom self-fulfilling prophecies occur but are typically small, and that teachers' expectations predict later performance partly because the expectations are accurate.
Who they are
Jussim and Kent D. Harber's review appeared in Personality and Social Psychology Review in 2005 and drew on thirty-five years of research. It is the source for several numbers this site uses about the Oak School study: an average whole-school difference of about four IQ points, significant mainly in the first and second grades, and an overall pattern the authors call messier than the popular summary.
Their central argument has two halves. The first is that self-fulfilling prophecies in classrooms are real but small, with expectations changing the achievement of roughly five to ten per cent of pupils, and that they do not accumulate greatly across teachers or over time. The second is that the correlation between what a teacher expects and what a pupil later achieves is mostly accuracy, because teachers read pupils reasonably well.
The review also records what it considers unresolved: whether expectations affect intelligence itself, whether they do more harm than good, and whether strong effects are concentrated among pupils from stigmatised groups.
This page rests on the review and its repository record. Jussim's other work was not read for the site.
Key papers
Jussim, L., & Harber, K. D. (2005). Teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies: Knowns and unknowns, resolved and unresolved controversies. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9(2), 131-155. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0902_3
Key ideas
Small, uneven and fading. Expectation effects in classrooms are typically small and do not build up much over time.
Accuracy. A teacher's expectation can predict a pupil's results because it is a good forecast, not because it caused them.
A place in the book trail. David Robson's The Expectation Effect cites Jussim, according to the vault's audit of that book, for the point that expectancy effects exist, and not for the sceptical conclusions above.
Sources
- Jussim, L., & Harber, K. D. (2005). Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9(2), 131-155. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0902_3 (repository record at Rutgers University).