Stephen W. Raudenbush

Who they are

Raudenbush's paper in the Journal of Educational Psychology (1984, 76(1), 85-97) set out to explain why experiments testing teacher expectancy effects on pupil IQ had given conflicting results. His hypothesis was that the better teachers know their pupils when the expectation is induced, the smaller the effect.

The synthesis covered eighteen of twenty-one experiments located. The overall mean effect was about 0.11 standard deviations. Experiments in which teachers had known their pupils for two weeks or less, ten of them, averaged about two tenths of a standard deviation and showed a significant effect on all four combined tests. The eight in which they had known them longer averaged close to zero and showed no significant effect in either direction.

Effects were larger in grades one and two than in grades three to six, and reappeared in grade seven. The paper found no support for explanations based on the type of test or on whether testers were aware of the expectancy induction.

Nothing about Raudenbush's later work was checked for this page.

Key papers

Raudenbush, S. W. (1984). Magnitude of teacher expectancy effects on pupil IQ as a function of the credibility of expectancy induction: A synthesis of findings from 18 experiments. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(1), 85-97. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.76.1.85

Key ideas

The contact moderator. The longer teachers had known their pupils before the induction, the smaller the effect. Where teachers already hold a view of a child, an outside label adds little.

A gap in popular accounts. According to the vault's audit, David Robson's The Expectation Effect does not mention Raudenbush, so general readers of that book do not meet the pooled figure or the moderator.

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