Mike Rose and Education

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how Mike Rose's "I Just Wanna Be Average" gives some interesting insights into the problems of student motivation and some of the potential ways to motivate underachieving students. It looks at how Rose's article suggests some helpful ways to deal with the problem of student motivation, including the potential influence of one key figure in a student's life or through extrinsic rewards.

From the Paper:

"This is not a novel or innovative idea, as the concept of educator expectancy on student achievement has been studied since the 1960's. In a landmark 1966 study, Rosenthal and Jacobson examined how the expectations of teacher's affected children's performance by randomly assigning students as either bright or dull. In the study, Teachers scored students who were labeled as "bloomers" with higher grades than students labeled as dull. A 1974 follow up study by Chaiken, Sigler, and Derlega got similar results. The authors video- taped the interactions between teachers and children in a classroom setting, and noted that teachers smiled more often at supposedly gifted students, maintained more eye contact with the bright students, and responded more positively to their comments."

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