Dr. Robert Rosenthal of Harvard conducted dozens of controlled experiments over the years to test the power of the expectations of teachers on student performance.
In his landmark book, Pygmalion in the Classroom, he tells of case after case where teachers were told that a student, or sometimes a whole class, was extremely bright and was predicted to make a quantum leap in academic performance in the coming year.
Even though the students were chosen from the school population at large, as long as the teachers believed that these students were exceptional, and the teachers expected them to do well, the students performed vastly better than other students in the same or similar classes and vastly better than could have been predicted by previous grades or behavior.
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