In the first video, I observed how discrimination can be learned when even small differences are found between two people. The value of each type is weighed and the trait that is deemed superior gains a sense of power that is unnecessary and harmful to the community. Children who had blue eyes were determined as having a higher intelligence and value than the children who had brown eyes. After learning this, the brown eyed children were treated differently because they were seen as lower. In the class, there was fighting and hating that hadn’t been there before.

In the second video, I learned how stereotypes are not always applied to other people, but can be applied to ourselves because of threat. Stereotypes threaten people because they feel like they are doomed to be judged by others. The negative stereotypes prevent individuals from performing their best or presenting their true self because the image of the stereotype gets in the way.

In the final video, I learned about how the pygmalion effect and positive expectations can help students increase their intelligence. The first factor is being nice to the students that are given the positive expectations. The kindness in the tone and words of the teacher helps the child to respond positively and increase their efforts. The second factor is the input factor where teachers give more information to students they believe will be able to learn more and won’t waste their time on children who won’t be able to. The third factor is the response factor where children who have more expected from them are called on more and have longer time periods to answer questions. And the last factor is feedback, giving positive feedback to students with positive expectations and negative or no feedback to students with low expectations.

Overall, these videos have taught me that not all teaching styles are equal. As I remember back to my own experiences, I can recall these different types of learning that happened in the schools I attended. To fix this, teachers will need to learn and understand the importance of equal opportunities in the classroom.

Jane Elliot’s Experiment: The study about brown eyed students vs. blue eyes students opened my eyes up to a lot of what is present in the schools these days. At first, the blue eyes students were considered superior to the brown-eyed students according to an authority figure(the teacher), which prompted the blue-eyed students to become more aggressive towards the brown-eyed students. The study portrayed the power of negative expectations placed on the brown-eyed students, causing their scores to significantly lower than the blue-eyed students, along with a diminished outlook of themselves due to the persecution and discrimination.

Claude Steele’s Experiment:  The study displayed the threats that stereotypes have on individuals even when it’s unintentional. If the stereotype is true, it could possibly diminish the individual’s results. When students in a health class were tested for athletic ability with their knowing, the African American students had better results compared to the Caucasian students. When tested for athletic strategy and reasoning capabilities, however, Caucasian students had better results.

Rosenthal & Jacobson’s Experiment: When compared to the experiment that Jane Elliot performed, this study is assessing the power of positive expectations. The study was testing the Pygmalion Effect which is the extent that teachers’ expectations influence kids’ intelligence. The researchers drew some names from a hat of kids who were in the class and made the teachers believe that those kids were “late-bloomers” even when no studies were done to prove that. Based on this fact, the teachers began to treat those students differently, having more expectations for them to excel in the class. The increased teachers’ expectations on them caused the “late bloomers” to think more positively about themselves and show more intelligence gain than others. There were changes in climate(teachers were more nicer), input(teachers taught more to those kids), response(teachers expected those kids to participate more in class), and feedback(teachers gave more praise to those kids) when this experiment was followed through.

Throughout my years of education, I have encountered many teachers and situations. It is very true according to the above experiments the influence that teachers’ expectations have on the performance of the students. When I first came to America, I was put in third grade with little to no knowledge about the American culture, language, or customs. Even though there were teachers who got tired of explaining things to me, a few teachers believed in me enough to stay after school for me to understand concepts or give me more chances to participate in class. I truly believe that it is because of those teachers who put effort into me in my younger days that I am where I am today. More than just a gain in intelligence, I was able to experience a boost in my self-esteem and I believed more in myself to achieve goals that people said I couldn’t.

If there are any improvements I would suggest for the school systems in this current time, it would be to have a more accepting outlook on different types of intelligence. Intelligence is not just based on an individual’s science/math capabilities. It is based on a passion that an individual has on a certain topic, regardless of what it may be, and the portrayal of that passion. If a student lacks academic intelligence, a teacher shouldn’t just focus on the other students in the class. Instead, give an equal opportunity for each student to excel in academic intelligence as well their own passions.

 

In the first video dealing with the blue and brown eyed children, I felt highly sympathetic for what Jane Elliot purpose was. She successfully presented to young children what, and how discrimination or racism works. With a simple and nearly harmless experiment procedure she has and will permanently change people’s perception. Coming from self experience she was right when she noted that discrimination happens fairly often. Moreover the aspect of feeling the power of superiority over others who are different is a logical and reasonable explanation for it all. In the second video stereotype threats are discussed. This video sheds some light on the different kind of pressure that students might have to deal with in school. Just like discrimination, I also believe that stereotype threats have an affect on a significant amount of students. The experiment gave an good example of what actually goes on in school and reality. In the last video where they discuss the Pygmalion Effect, I would not say that I agree with this video as much as the other ones. While there were obviously one or two factors that played a big role in student’s lives, the others seemed to be less noticeable. It will take a lot more to convince me that the other factors play an important role as well. The experiment gave a good representative of how possibly students are affected by all four factors. Throughout my school career I have witnessed as well as been victim to these problems discussed today. Some I have dealt with more than others however I didn’t not have it as bad as others in the world. Definitely something needs to change within our education system however I cannot specify what exactly needs to be done. If it were so easy to fix the problem it would have been solved ages ago but that is not the case when dealing with these. Hopefully a change will come so that students are not discriminated, mistreated, or had a feeling of inferiority because of school.

The three videos I watched were interesting in their ow ways. All 3 were different but related to how environment and social pressure plays a large role in intelligence. The first video talked about an experiment a teacher from Riceville, Iowa named Jane Elliot did on her elementary students. To give the kids a real life example of how discrimination and inequality works, Jane divided the class into two groups: the superior blue-eyed kids and the inferior brown-eyed kids. With all seriousness, she stressed to kids that brown eyed people were not as good or as special as those who are blue-eyed and were not to be talked to or played with. Throughout the day the blue-eyed kids really showed discrimination, mistreatment and unearned power over the kids with brown eyes; there was a lot of name calling, fighting, and hurt feelings over the duration of the school day. When evaluated and the end of the day, the blue-eyed kids expressed that they loved the powerful feeling they had and the brown-eyed kids stressed how hard it was to be someone with brown eyes. They talked about how they had to fight and stand up to people just because their eyes were different than someone else’s, something they had no control of. One child even made the connection “it’s like calling black people niggers.” Another big part of the experiment was the test scores of these two different groups. The superior, better treated group showed to have much higher test results than those of the inferior position. In my elementary schools growing up, we never did anything quite like this, but I wish we did. How much this test effected these kids and made them think about discrimination from a personal experience level is amazing to me. I think it’s great that Jane Elliot went around the country demonstrating this to kids everywhere. Another big aspect of this test is that it does show discrimination effecting intelligence and a child’s performance in the classroom, something to be very concerned about as a teacher or parent.
The second video was about the famous stereotype threat, something that everybody has experienced. This is something that anybody belonging to a certain group (race, club, religion, gender, etc.) can relate to in some kind of way. The man in the video says “when facing a negative stereotype, ones performance will confirm that it’s true. The test they did involved a class room full of men, some black and some white, asked to complete a test about golf. When a group was told it was about “athletic ability” the black men did much better, but when told it was all based on “strategy” the white men did much better. Given the exact same tasks and questions but with a different way of introducing and instructing them based off stereotypes resulted in very different results. As the video says, this is one thing we have all experienced or seen, including myself. As a black person, I have always been expected to struggle in swimming, and without realizing it, that effected my mind into actually thinking I was a bad swimmer. It wasn’t until a year or two ago that I realized and told myself that I’m actually a fairly decent swimmer. I think that stereotype threat is something that schools must take a look at very closely. Once again, it has proven to effect the intelligence and classroom performance of individuals, but this time with more than just race. On this experiment alone, teachers can see that the way things are presented to students can have very large effects on them, therefore they should take precautions to avoid these situation. Presenting work to students that intimidates no one or appeals to everyone could be a great solution to the problem presented by this video.

The third and last video discusses the in-school problem of individual treatment effecting how children do in school. In this test, teachers were given a handful of random names of children in their class whose test results supposedly showed that their future intelligence stood out among the others. One year later test results showed that the specific, random kids that the teacher was told about, actually improved on their scores and got smarter. The test showed that teachers expectations actually did effect children’s intelligence. The children that were supposed to do better in school, according to certain tests on intelligence, the teachers spent more time on and gave more attention to. This video was a well thought out experiment and I can see how the results helped and brought forth new information about teaching, however, I don’t think I experienced anything like this at all. If anything, I went through the exact opposite of this, our smarter and more intelligent kids were allowed to be more independent while the kids who did worse on our big tests and struggled the most were focussed on by the teachers. In my school it was almost like the only way the teacher was going to spend more time on you and give extra help was if you showed that you needed it more than the other kids. It was almost as if the reward for being more intelligent was teachers letting you be free more than other children. This way proved to work great for us, and I think it’s the best way to do things. Teachers helping get the struggling children caught up and making the class more “even” in intelligence seem way more fair than giving extra help to those kids who show to already be ahead of the other. That will only make the gap of intelligence in the class room even bigger.