Self-fulfillment

Type :

School essay

Pages :

20 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

10/19/2007

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Humanities/philosophy

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Summary :

Introduction
The peer reviewed journal articles concerning self fulfilling prophecies
1. The conclusions of Lee Jussim
2. Teacher expectations and observations
The focus popular media
The birth of MTV
Conclusion
Works cited

Abstract

The controversy surrounding self-fulfilling prophecies, while originally centered on proving their existence, has recently settled on the probability of such phenomenon occurring in a natural environment. While not directly cited in this resource guide, the original "Pygmalion Effect" experiment by Robert Rosenthal and Leonore Jacobson, while a success in its own self-absorbed goals, failed to make any connections outside of its own hypothesis. The Harvard professor and elementary school principal proved that teacher expectation can directly influence student achievement, but the experiment, conducted in a fixed environment, did not initially translate to the naturalistic world. The original teachers, the independent variables of the test, were told what to expect from their students, and although those students, a heterogeneous mixture of academic potentials, did in fact respond with positive correlation to the subsequent behaviors of their teachers, there was no guarantee that such cause and effect would occur in a literal classroom. In a series of experiments that followed in the decade after Rosenthal and Jacobson's revolutionary yet flawed research, the naturalistic implications of the Pygmalion Effect were established, answering the question of whether or not teachers do make such drastic predictions, basing their expectations on first impressions and superficial observations and inadvertently fulfilling their own prophecies concerning their students.