Lenore Jacobson

Who they are

The Oak School study is usually told as Robert Rosenthal's, and the shorthand hides its co-author. The first report, Rosenthal and Jacobson (1966), appeared in Psychological Reports (19(1), 115-118) under the title Teachers' expectancies: Determinants of pupils' IQ gains, and the full account followed as the 1968 book.

The design was simple enough to explain in a sentence. Teachers were given a list of pupils described as academic bloomers, and the pupils on the list had been chosen at random. Adam Alter's retelling in Drunk Tank Pink (2013) reports that the first and second graders on the list outscored their classmates by ten to fifteen IQ points. Jussim and Harber (2005) give the average whole-school difference as about four points.

The record used for this page does not give her career, her role at the school beyond Jussim and Harber's phrase, or her later work. It is better left thin than filled in from memory.

Key papers

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1966). Teachers' expectancies: Determinants of pupils' IQ gains. Psychological Reports, 19(1), 115-118. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1966.19.1.115

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the Classroom. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Key ideas

The Pygmalion effect. The claim that a teacher's expectations can change what a pupil achieves, not only how the teacher rates it. The original study supports a small, uneven version of the claim, concentrated in the first two grades, and later experiments put the average at about a tenth of a standard deviation.

Positive labels only. Jussim and Harber note that Oak School tested only positive expectations, so it cannot say whether negative ones do harm.

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