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Extended Essay
On the Effects of Teachers’ Relationships on Student Performance in
School
ResearchQuestion:Howcana teachers’relationshipwithastudentaffectthe student’s performance in
school as well astheiroutlookonsuccessthroughouttheirtime inschool?Whatisthe optimal
relationshipthata studentanda teachercan have to most furtherthe student'sacademiccareer?
IB Subject: Psychology
By Zeke Williams
Candidate 0604 - 0075
Supervisor: Mr. James Grantz
School: William J. Palmer High School (0604)
Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA
Diploma Session: May 2014
Word Count: 2,870
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Abstract:
In this paper, I use a combination of my own personal experiences and an assortment of
psychological effects and studies to describe how a decent relationship between teacher and
student can mutually benefit all people included and how all of these things can combine to
contribute to this circumstance. One of the effects, the Pygmalion effect, can affect the
relationship in either direction and, paired with Urie Bronfenbrenner’s model for a child’s
development, Rosenthal and Jacobsen’s experimenter expectancy effect, and self fulfilling
prophecies can explain how negative and positive relationships with teachers can have a very
different effect on their academic career. I also include several personal experiences which have
granted me a great deal of knowledge about the effects of different kinds of relationships
between teacher and student. Between the many teachers I have learned from in elementary,
junior high, and high school, there is a wide variety of connections between teacher and learner.
With my experiences as a student I can give a firsthand look at how all of these piece together
to create a very complicated system with which we all have experiences with, and how it has an
effect on all of us.
Introduction:
Throughout my time in school, I have had the pleasure of experiencing a variety of
teachers and teaching styles. Whether they were kind and encouraging or scornful and
demanding, they have all had a very large effect on the way that I work and study in school.
There have been teachers with a laissez-faire style of teaching, who expect the students to do
all of the work and who do not do much of their own, and there have been the more
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accommodating teachers who are thorough and make sure that everyone is where they need
to be. One of these styles of teaching is far more effective than the other. If a teacher is
accommodating to a student’s needs and to the students situation, a much better relationship
can be built that will be more mutually beneficial.
Background Information:
In elementary school, I had two teachers at one time; one who seemed to dislike the
students and their parents and seemed as if he did not actually know what he was doing, and
one who interacted with all of the students, making certain that everyone was learning and
gaining the experience. Granted, one of them was my fourth grade home room teacher and the
other was a gifted and talented teacher respectively, one with only five students in the class,
the latter had a much larger effect on my perseverance in school than the former. Having these
two teachers at the same time taught me a valuable lesson about how teachers can have an
effect on their students. Every day I looked forward to my gifted and talented class so that I
could continue working on the book the five of us were working on, and I always dreaded going
back to my homeroom.
These emotions had an effect on how I performed in school. I focused less on my core
classes and more on the GT class. In fact, I can clearly remember many of the experiences that I
had in the GT class, but I have very few memories of my homeroom class. There is an effect in
psychology called the Pygmalion Effect, which, at least in an educational context, can be used
to explain why a person will act on their initial impressions of a person. The Pygmalion Effect
was used in a study by Pamela C. Rubovits and Martin L. Maehr to see if a teacher’s knowledge
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of a student would have an effect on how they treated that student.1 Rubovits and Maehr’s
study included 66 undergraduate females that were in a teacher training course. The
undergraduate students each received a class of two white and two black students who had
been randomly assigned titles of “gifted” and “not gifted.” Through these titles, the teachers
began to praise the “gifted” children and not the “non-gifted” children.2
Based on the Pygmalion Black and White study, it was discerned that if a teacher is told
that a student is bright, or they notice enthusiasm for learning from the student, they will act
on this information. From then on the teacher will give that student more attention because
they know that the student will accept the help and do even better. However, the effect works
in the inverse as well. If they are told that a student is slow or notice negative behavior to
learning, they will not give the student as much attention because they already know that the
student will not respond to the attention.
I do not know what went wrong with my relationship with my homeroom teacher, if his
first impressions of me were negative and I did not change that, or perhaps he was just a bad
teacher. The second option seems more likely because none of the students really thought
highly of the teacher. On the other hand, all of the students in the GT program had a good
experience with the teacher. Only five people were accepted into my fourth grade Gifted and
Talented class, so first impressions made quite a difference to the teacher.
In middle school, my class was introduced to Mr. Smith. We were his first ever class and
that created a much larger bond between teacher and student than any normal class would
1 See Maehr, M. L., & Rubovits, P. C. (1973). Pygmalion Black and White
2 ibid
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have. After having the class for two years the school closed and the entire program and most of
the students moved to a new school, creating another bond between everyone in the program.
Mr. Smith was unlike any teacher I had before that point. He inspired us to learn about science;
to instead of falling asleep in his class, look up at the board and discover all of the different
areas of science. The class was never boring; it was almost like Mr. Smith’s youth allowed him
to be more creative and better connect with us as students and as a friend. I would have to say
that Mr. Smith had one of the largest impacts on me throughout my time in school and part of
this was because he was only ever a strict teacher when he had to be; he encouraged everyone
to excel.
In high school, and especially in the International Baccalaureate program, I have had a
great variety of teachers. There are some who are notorious for being strict and expect
perfection from the students, and others who still expect perfection, but who you never want
to disappoint. Nearly every teacher in this program has become an authority figure for me, a
role model even. I expect that the Pygmalion effect has played an instrumental role in this
program for a long time. Teachers know that the students come from strong academic
backgrounds, and they know that academics are a major priority to the students. Due to this,
they give the students extra attention to keep them on the right path. This is different from
regular education classes because the Pygmalion effect works in a different way than usual. In a
regular class, the teacher would not know what to expect from the students, so they would act
on their initial impressions.
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The Pygmalion effect can still be seen in the few necessary occasions when an IB
student must take a regular education class as a requirement. While the teacher seems
downbeat and unmotivated towards the other students, he or she will sometimes obviously
gravitate towards the “higher level” students because they know that these students are more
likely trying to gain something out of the class.
There have been a few teachers that I have come to revere because of their ability to
inspire me to achieve excellence even after it has become one of my highest priorities. One of
which I did not get along with at first, and that was due in part to the fact that I did not really
understand the material. Eventually though, I came to respect the teacher and I made sure that
I understood the material so that I could maintain the relationship that was formed. This has
happened to me a few times in my past. I have met a teacher that I do not entirely agree with,
and we put up with each other for a while. But I inevitably cave in and go talk to the teacher.
This allows the teacher to see that I advocate for myself and allows them to create different
expectations for me. I effectively cancel out their first impressions of me and give them
something new to expect from me in the future, the new thing being determination to succeed.
However, there have also been a few teachers who have failed to inspire me that I never
really came to a complete understanding with. I believe that one of these teachers in particular
and I eventually reached a sort of mutual respect for one another, and it was their attitude that
really kept me from quitting out of the class as some of my friends had done. This is the one
exception that I believe there is to the benefits of the Pygmalion Effect in this program. If this
teacher had been more accommodating, I may have not tried as hard as I did to pass the class.
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At the end of the year, I focused almost entirely on the one subject because I knew that I
needed to catch up to the rest of the students and make up for lost time in order to pass the
class. If it was not for my disagreement with my teacher, would have never wanted to prove
her expectations of me passing the class wrong.
In my experiences in school, the nicer teachers have had a better effect on my
motivation and my determination to succeed. Although there has been an occasional teacher
that I have disagreed with and that I tried to prove their expectations of me wrong, these “not
nice” teachers have never been able to motivate me as much as their opposites.
Rosenthal and Jacobsen:
As Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen found in their 1966 study, Teachers’
expectancies: Determinates of pupils’ IQ gains, a teacher’s expectations from a student turned
into a self fulfilling prophecy. Lau and Russell define a self fulfilling prophecy as the “process by
which one’s expectations about another person eventually lead the other person to behave in
ways that confirm these expectations.” 3 “An experimenter may think a certain behavior results
from his or her scientific treatment of one subject or one group of subjects compared with
another. Actually the behavior may result from nothing more than the experimenter’s own
biased expectations. If this occurs, it renders the experiment invalid. This threat to the validity
of a psychological experiment is called the experimenter expectancy effect. “ 4 Both of these
concepts can be applied to education. The self fulfilling prophecy is when a person creates
3 See Week 3: Self-fulfillingProphecy,Correspondence Inference Theory, Covariation Model,Lau & Russell,Lau &
Russell Review Sheet (new).
4 ibid
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expectations for something, in this case a teacher to a student, and as the timeline of their
relationship progresses the expectations turn into realities. As for the experimenter expectancy
effect, the teacher unintentionally shows their expectations, whether they are high or low, to
the student and the student uses that information subconsciously to excel in the class.
If the teacher shows low expectations, the student will realize this and will aim for the
low standards given to them by the teacher. This of course works vice versa; high expectations
also yield high standards of work. Another side to the experimenter expectancy effect that can
have influence on a student’s performance in school is shown by Clever Hans. A horse that
could supposedly read, spell, and solve math problems. Later, it was realized that the horse
could not actually do these magnificent things, but rather he would pay attention to whomever
it was that was testing his skills. In the case of math problems, the horse would watch the
experimenter, and the experimenter would unintentionally give subtle hints to the horse as it
reached the correct answer. Knowing that these apprehensive hints meant that the horse
would receive praise if it stopped stomping its foot (how the horse “counted”), he would stop
stomping.5
This can be applied to a student teacher relationship in that the student keeps acting
and learning the way that the teacher wants them to. If the student does something right, they
receive praise. But sometimes, at least with younger students, they do not know why they are
receiving praise. So they keep doing what they are doing but never realize why it is significant.
For example a group of fifth graders are asked to complete a group project. They set to work on
it and make a very good project that they later present to the class. The students learn about
5See Rosenthal, R., & Jacobsen,L. What You Expect Is What You Get
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the subject that they were assigned and they hypothetically receive a good grade and praise for
their work, but they do not understand the exact reasons that they are being praised for and
they don’t realize what they have accomplished and learned by working in a group. In any
certain scenario where a teacher gives a student a task, there is a probability that the student
will misinterpret the task given to them and they will produce something that is good, but not
exactly what the teacher wanted. In most cases the teacher just takes this as the student being
dumb or not understanding what they wanted them to do. The experimenters that worked with
Clever Hans the horse probably at first believed this horse to be advanced beyond other horses,
as teachers believe some students to be more advanced than other students. They may have
even believed that other horses that could not perform as Clever Hans did were “dumb.” This is
significant because it shows that even early on in a student’s life, if they misinterpret an
assignment and are believed to be “dumb” by their teacher, it may affect their academics for
the rest of their lives.
There was a psychologist named Urie Bronfenbrenner who developed a model to help
show the systems around children that can have a large effect on their development. There are
five systems in the model, the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem, the macrosystem,
and the chronosystem.6 The two most relevant are the microsystem and the mesosystem; the
microsystem details all of the environments in which the child is interacting with and is
personally affected. A good example of this would be a classroom. In this system, the child is
affected directly, and he or she builds relationships in the system. The mesosystem is what
happens when two different microsystems interact with one another. A good example of this
6 See Bronfenbrenner’s Microsystems and Mesosystems
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would be the parent/teacher conferences. The child’s microsystem of school and the classroom
and the relationship that they have built with their teacher collides with their microsystem of
their home and their parents. In this situation, the Pygmalion effect and the relationship that
the student has built with the teacher comes into question once again.
If the student has built a good relationship with the teacher and in turn is being
encouraged to do better, then the collision will go over smoothly. But if the relationship that
the student has built with the teacher is a negative one and the teacher is not doing a good job
of encouraging the student, then a conflict evolves. Either the parents become disappointed
with their child, or they realize based on how the teacher acted at the conference why the
student has developed a negative view of the teacher and tends to agree. This all can have a
large effect on the student’s motivation throughout the rest of the year in this particular class.
If the collision of microsystems went over smoothly, then it is almost like the relationship has
moved on to the next level and the student, parent, and teacher can all trust one another. But,
if there is conflict and the parent realizes why the student disagrees with the teacher, then the
parent can no longer trust the teacher and can only rely on what their child tells them from
now on, which can lead to large miscommunications and a lack of attention on that class, which
is usually the class that the student needs to concentrate on the most.
Using Urie Bronfenbrenner’s model and Pamela C. Robevits and Martin L. Maehr’s study
on the Pygmalion effect in an educational context as well as the self fulfilling prophecy and the
experimenter expectancy effect, the importance of a good relationship between student and
teacher can be seen. Without a decent, communicative relationship, the student loses
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motivation and focus on the subject, which is also brought down by the teacher’s criticisms of
the child and the lack of praise that the child will then receive. If a teacher has negative first
impressions of a student because of the students actions, what the teacher has heard about the
student or a great deal of other variables, that negativity will project itself onto the relationship
that teacher has with the student for the rest of the school year. When a student with the right
learning style and personality meets up with a teacher that has a collaborating teaching style
and personality, a very good relationship can be formulated. With this comes the promise of a
good academic career and a better future for both. Thus, a mutually beneficial relationship
between teacher and student.
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Works Cited
Bronfenbrenner's Microsystems and Mesosystems. (n.d.). Retrieved January 6, 2014, from
http://www.vvc.edu/academic/child_development/droege/ht/course2/faculty/lecture/
cd6lectmicro.html
Maehr, M. L., & Rubovits, P. C. (1973). Pygmalion Black and White. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 25(2), 210-218.
Rosenthal, R., & Jacobsen, L. (n.d.). What You Expect Is What You Get. Retrieved January 6,
2014, from http://homepages.gac.edu/~jwotton2/PSY225/rosenthal66.pdf
Week 3: Self-fulfilling Prophecy, Correspondence Inference Theory, Covariation Model, Lau &
Russell, Lau & Russell Review Sheet (new). (n.d.). Retrieved January 6, 2014, from
http://www.umich.edu/~psychol/380sek/Week3.html
