Lab Experiments in Education

• Lab experiments Open and closed systems

  Keat and Urry

  believes lab experiments are only suitable studying closed systems where the researcher can control all the relevant variables - this makes labs unsuitable when studying social phenomena
• Lab experiments Hawthorne effect

  Elton Mayo

  if subjects know they are being observed, this may lead them to alter their behaviour
• Lab experiments SFP

  Rosenthal and Jacobsen

  manipulated teachers expectation about pupils by giving them false information around pupils abilities to discover the effect this had on achievement

  after an 'IQ' test pupils were selected at random to be expected as 'late bloomers' - as they were selected at random there should have been no reason to expect their performance to be any different than their peers

  all pupils were retested after 8 months and found the 'late bloomers' improved more than other pupils

  the greatest improvement was found in the youngest children
• Lab experiments preconceived ideas

  Harvey and Slatin

  examined whether teachers had preconceived ideas about pupils from different social classes - used a sample of 96 teachers - to control other variables, the photographs were divided equally in gender and ethnicity

  found lower class children were rated less favourably, especially by more experienced teachers

  based their ratings on similarities between children in the photos and pupils they had taught

  this indicates teachers label pupils from different social classes and use these labels to pre judge a pupils ability
• Lab experiments

  Charkin et al

  sample of 48 uni students who each taught a lesson to a 10 year old boy

  • 1/3rd were told the boy was highly motivated and intelligent
  • 1/3rd were told that he was poorly motivated with a low IQ
  • 1/3rd was give no information

  Charkin et al videoed the lessons and found the high expectancy group made eye contact and gave more encouraging body language than the low expectancy group