self fulfilling prophecy

• there are 3 stages of the self fullfilling prophecy
• stage 1


  a teacher labels a pupil eg) as being very intelligent and on the basis of this label they make predictions about them. the label is based on appearance behaviour etc.
• stage 2


  the teacher treats the pupil accordingly, as if the prediciton is already true. eg) giving them more attention and expecting a higher standard of work
• stage 3

  the pupil internalises the teacher's expectation which becomes apart of their self image so they now become the type of pupil the teacher believed them to be. the prediciton is fullfilled
• rosenthal and jacobson found that when teachers were told that some children had high iq scores, they performed better than those who weren't told anything. however, it wasn't true, all the kids had been randomly selected from the same class
• rosenthal and jacobson also found that when teachers were informed that certain students had low iq scores, they expected less from them and therefore treated them differently. This led to lower achievement levels among these students
• rosenthal and jacobson concluded that labelling can have an impact on student performance because it affects how teachers treat and interact with individual students
• rosenthal and jacobson suggest that schools need to train teachers not to use stereotypes or prejudices against certain groups of people
• self fullfilling prophecy = when students internalise their label as a part of their identity