In the mid-1960’s, two researchers visited an elementary school in the San Francisco area and administered a test called the “Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition” that was purported to identify students who were likely to experience significant academic growth in the coming year (“bloomers,” they were called).
They compiled a list of student names, and shared the list with teachers, explaining that these students scored in the top 20% on the test and showed “unusual potential for intellectual growth.”
Eight months later, the researchers administered the test again, and lo and behold, the students on the list scored significantly higher than their peers!
Of course, what the teachers didn’t know was that there was no such thing as the “Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition” (it was just a regular old IQ test), the test had no such predictive powers, and even more importantly, the students on the list didn’t actually score in the top 20%. They were selected purely at random.
So the mere expectation that certain students would experience an academic growth spurt, somehow led a randomly-selected group of students to outperform their peers.
On one hand, that’s pretty cool. On the other, it’s a little sobering to think that simply having lower expectations could impede a student’s growth. How is it that our expectations can have such an impact on students’ performance and learning anyway?
Expectancy theory
In sports, expectancy theory describes the connection between a coach’s expectations and an athlete’s performance as a 4-step process.
- The coach usually makes an initial judgment about the athlete’s ability and forms expectations about their performance potential based on a variety of elements ranging from personal factors (e.g. age, ethnicity, gender), to performance factors (e.g. coordination), to psychological factors (e.g. confidence, motivation).
- These expectations then begin to influence the coach’s behaviors toward the athlete. High expectancy athletes, for instance, generally receive higher quality feedback (and more feedback in general).
- The athlete starts to become aware of the coach’s behaviors and expectations, which affects their own self-perceptions and behaviors.
- The athlete’s performance tends to fall in line with the coach’s initial expectations (high expectancy athletes generally outperform low expectancy athletes), which the coach interprets as proof that their initial assessment of the athlete was correct.
Furthermore, the tendency is for these initial perceptions or impressions to stick, and to be inflexible over time – even when new information presents itself. So unfortunately, the coach’s behaviors persist, and high expectancy athletes continue to benefit from more confidence-building and performance-enhancing attention and instruction than low expectancy athletes.
Yet, if the ultimate goal as an educator is to create a winning culture and maximize everyone’s performance, doesn’t every individual deserve to receive the kind of attention that would help them learn and grow and reach their potential – not just those who are perceived to have greater abilities?
Pat Summitt
Pat Summitt is the former coach of the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. Often compared to legendary UCLA coach John Wooden because of her teams’ remarkable success (18 NCAA Final Four appearances and 8 national championships), researchers approached her shortly after she became the winningest coach in NCAA Division I history, to see if she would be willing to have her coaching behavior observed, coded, and analyzed.
She agreed, and in the 2004-2005 season, researchers observed 504 minutes of practice, and coded 3,296 specific coaching behaviors to see what insights could be gleaned from Summitt’s coaching style.
The researchers were of course curious about the content of her coaching, but they were also really interested in comparing how she treated and coached her star players vs. her non-star players. Generally, star players get more of a coach’s attention. How would it be with Summitt and her athletes?
Summitt vs. Wooden
The data yielded some striking similarities between Summitt’s coaching behaviors and that of John Wooden (for a comparison, check out the earlier post on Wooden’s coaching style).
Like Wooden, instruction was the most common type of coaching behavior Summitt exhibited. Nearly half (48%) of everything she said in practice was instructional in nature (e.g. “When the guard is curling back and you’re posting, make sure that you screen first, then post”).
Praise represented only 14.5% of her coaching behaviors (e.g. “Way to read the court. Nice look inside.”), and scolding occurred only 6.86% of the time (e.g. “Go ahead and mark that down for a sprint. This is unacceptable in our program.”).
High-expectancy vs. low-expectancy
Both before and after the season, Summitt completed a short survey on each player, which, combined with their playing time, allowed the researchers to rank order the players in terms of Summitt’s expectations of their abilities and potential contribution to the team.
Previous research on coaching behavior suggests that coaches treat high and low-expectancy athletes differently at all levels of competition (at least from high school through national levels of competition). Thus, the researchers fully expected that Summitt would provide a greater quantity and quality of feedback to her high expectancy athletes – after all, these are the athletes who are more likely to make bigger contributions in games.
But remarkably, that is not what they found. On Summitt’s teams, the bottom 5 players on the team (low-expectancy players) received just as much quality instruction and attention as the top 5 players on the team (high-expectancy players). The same amount of instruction. Same amount of praise. Same amount of scolds. Same amount of hustles, questioning, modeling, etc.
The authors suggest that part of her success must be attributed to her efforts to develop all of the players on her teams, not just the star players.
The indirect path to winning?
Economics professor John Kay wrote a book titled “Obliquity” which argues that we are often able to reach our goals most effectively if we pursue them indirectly. Accruing wealth by focusing on research and development rather than maximizing profit, for instance. Or finding happiness by focusing on fulfillment and meaning rather than seeking happiness per se.
Among all of Pat Summitt’s many records and achievements, she often noted that her greatest accomplishment was that every player who completed their eligibility under her watch either completed their degree or were in the process of doing so. Sounds like the sentiment of a coach who was an educator at heart…so perhaps teaching is the indirect path to winning?
It’s human nature to make snap judgments, and probably very unrealistic to think that we could see everyone as being equivalently talented. But the study on Summitt’s coaching behavior suggests that perhaps that’s ok. As long as we approach each student as a potential “bloomer” (and we can’t really know what anyone’s real ceiling is anyway – case in point, Tom Brady) and treat each student with high expectations, we can likely still optimize their learning and growth, and provide them with the kind of feedback they need to develop confidence and make the most of their abilities.
