Do Teachers Bias Children’s Learning?

The publication of Pygmalion in the Classroom by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) stirred heated professional controversy and considerable public interest in the notion that teachers' expectations regarding a child's ability influence the child's classroom learning and test performance. Indeed, a number of articles have appeared in the popular press in which the data in Pygmalion were interpreted to imply that children's school performance could be improved simply by making the teacher think better of the child's ability (e.g., see Yunker, 1970). At the same time serious doubts about the reliability and validity of Rosenthal and Jacobson's findings were being raised in the professional literature (e.g., Snow, 1969; Thorndike, 1968, 1969). Since the publication of Pygmalion, the professional literature dealing directly with the issue of teacher-bias effects has grown rapidly (see Baker & Crist, 1971). This type of research is concerned with the possibility that teachers might intentionally or unintentionally suppress the learning of some students simply because they subjectively feel these students are not capable of grasping certain material as quickly or as well as most students. The term bias is used to describe this phenomenon when objective measures do not indicate differences in learning potential between the students expected to do poorly and the remainder of the class. The major purpose of this paper is to review the