Pygmalion revisited: A loud call for caution

The concept of the teacher experctancy effect continues to have a major impact on educational and psychological thinking. This article reviews the literature and concludes that the teacher expectancy effect, like the experimenter expectancy effect, is more difficult to demonstrate and less pervasive than has been claimed. It suggests that the most relevant issue is determining the relevant child characteristics that significantly cause a particular teacher to form an expectation about a particular child.

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Résumé L'effet produit par l'expoir que place un professeur en son élève continue d'exercer une influence capitale sur la pensée et la psychologie éducative. Cet article passe en revue les études consacrées à ce sujet et conclut que l'effet en question, tout comme dans le cas d'un expérimentateur, est plus difficile à prouver et moins généralisé qu'on ne le prétend. L'auteur estime que le problème capital consiste à déterminer chez l'enfant les caractéristiques valables qui incitent un professeur donné à fonder particulièrement certains espoirs sur un enfant donné.

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Editor's Note: The next issue ofInterchange will contain comments on Dr. Grieger's article by Robert Rosenthal and a reply by Grieger and Saavedra.     

Pygmalion revisited,revisited: On a loud and careless call for caution

As a critical document Grieger's paper is seriously deficient. There are grave errors of scholarship and misunderstandings of fundamental principles of statistical analysis and experimental methods. As a review of the literature on teacher expectancy effects it omits over three-fourths of the relevant studies conducted. The present paper attempts to correct some of the shortcomings described, provisionally summarizes the results of over 200 studies of interpersonal expectation, and suggests the type of research programs now needed most in our efforts to understand the social psychology of interpersonal expectations.

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Résumé En tant que critique, l'étude de Grieger comporte des lacunes graves. On y relève en effet de grosses erreurs de documentation et une sérieuse incompréhension des principes de base de l'analyse statistique et des méthodes expérimentales. En tant que revue des publications traitant de l'effet que provoque l'espoir entretenu par un professeur à l'égard de son élève, cette analyse ignore plus de trois-quarts des études valables consacrées à ce problème. L'auteur de la présente communication tente de corriger quelquesuns des défauts décrits ci-dessus; il donne un résumé provisoire de quelque 200 études sur l'espoir réciproque entre l'élève et le maître; il propose enfin le type de programmes de recherches dont nous avons le plus besoin à l'heure actuelle dans notre effort de compréhension de la psychologie sociale des espoirs réciproques.

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This paper was written in response to the invitation of the editor and its preparation was supported by a research grant from the Division of Social Sciences of the National Science Foundation. I want to thank Dane Archer and Pierce Barker for their helpful suggestions.     

Interpreting WISC-R and McCarthy scatter: A caution

In this investigation, indices of scatter on the WISC-R and McCarthy Scales were examined for 20 educable mentally retarded and 20 learning disabled children in relation to a similar control group. The scatter found in the two exceptional samples was also compared to the variability found in the standardization samples of the WISC-R and McCarthy. Results indicated that the learning-disabled sample exhibited more WISC-R subtest scatter and McCarthy Scale variability than the standardization sample but not more than the control group. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

A call for sobriety: sixteenth-century educationalists and humanist conviviality

Michel Jeanneret’s A Feast of Words. Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance (1987; English translation published in 1991) highlighted the celebration by Renaissance humanists of food and drink as catalysts of intellectual exchange. The author convincingly argued that Renaissance banquets served as a paradigm for the humanist body of ideas, and thus became an important setting for works of literature and erudition. This article investigates whether the use of banquets in humanist culture is also reflected in the didactic writings of the age. It focuses on the school dialogues of Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) and Juan Luis Vives (1492/3–1540), which proved to be enormously popular and were – according to a 1582 preface – read in “well-nigh every school” in England and continental Europe. The article illustrates how Erasmus and Vives, especially when addressing an audience of young school boys, aimed to organize a controlled satisfaction of bodily appetites, stimulating the interchange of ideas, whilst avoiding gluttony and intoxication, which are as detrimental for intellectual exchange as they are for the individual’s physical and spiritual well-being. The humanists’ condemnation of excess was thus connected with their analysis of the human condition and their preoccupation that every child should realize his or her full potential as a human being. The key element in this was considered to be education, which trained children to rise above their animal instincts and desires, and prepared them to participate in society as responsible adults.     

Reducing maltreatment recurrence through home visitation: A promising intervention for child welfare involved families

Maltreatment of children is a key predictor of a range of problematic health and developmental outcomes. Not only are affected children at high risk for recurrence of maltreatment, but effective interventions with known long term impact are few and limited. While home visiting is one of the most tested secondary prevention models for improving parenting, its primary focus on young primiparous mothers underemphasizes one of the most important risk groups: child welfare involved multiparous mothers. This study's focus is a randomized controlled trial of Healthy Families New York that included a subgroup of mothers (n = 104) who had at least one substantiated child protective services (CPS) report before enrolling in the program. By the child’s seventh birthday, mothers in the home visited group were as half as likely as mothers in the control group to be confirmed subjects for physical abuse or neglect (AOR = .46, p = .08). The number of substantiated reports for mothers in the control group was twice as high as for those in the home visited group (1.59 vs. 79 p = .02, ES = .44). Group differences were only observed after the child's third birthday, suggesting the possible effect of surveillance in early years. Post-hoc analyses indicate that home visited mothers had fewer subsequent births that may have contributed to less parenting stress and improved life course development for mothers. In light of our findings, we suggest considering and further testing home visiting programs as a tertiary prevention strategy for child welfare-involved mothers.     

ServiceNation: A call to higher education

The Serve America Act was signed into law in April 2009. Here's what Barbara Jacoby thinks the higher education community needs to do next.     

Measuring school improvement: A few experientially based words of caution

This paper describes the concerns of the authors rearading the use of standardized achievement scores to measure the quality of practice-oriented school improvement activities in school districts. The authors organize their comments into four issues which are related to current educational practice. While the paper focuses on warnings against the misuse of measurement processes, the authors agree with the call for accountability in the education of students. At a time when educators are under pressure to show results, particularly in urban settings, the authors recommend caution in relying exclusively on quantitative measures in judging the complex process of school improvement.     

Assessing personnel practices in higher education: A misleading note of caution

Williams and I provided a model of the ideal or random flow of people from a pre-selection pool of applicants to a post-selection work force. Dometrius and Sigelman claim that our test of the ideal versus actual work force composition lacks statistical power. They also claim that our assumption of random terminations is unreasonable. I show that their two claims are wrong, because they did not use relative measures of female representation in the work force, and because they base their modification of our model on unsupported supposition.