AlonzoMourning23
08-28-2006, 04:40 AM
The reassuring female voice asks the child a question: "Can you show me the doll that looks bad?"
The child, a preschool-aged Black girl, quickly picks up and shows the Black doll over a White one that is identical in every respect except complexion.
"And why does that look bad?"
"Because she's Black," the little girl answers emphatically.
"And why is this the nice doll?" the voice continues.
"Because she's White."
"And can you give me the doll that looks like you?"
The little girl hesitates for a split second before handing over the Black doll that she has just designated as the uglier one.
This was not the 1954 doll test used by pioneering psychologist Kenneth B. Clark to help make the case for desegregation in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated public schools. Rather, it was a doll test duplicated in Harlem, N. Y., last year, more than a half-century after Brown. To the chagrin of parents and psychologists across the nation, the results were unchanged.
The test is again in the news because of an 8-minute documentary produced by 17-year-old film student Kiri Davis of Manhattan's Urban Academy who participates in the Reel Works Teen Filmmaking program, a free after school program supported by HBO.
The video taped doll test resulted from a collection of writings Davis had compiled on issues of importance to Black girls in her high school. In that writing, she noticed that complexion was a recurring theme.
"I knew what my friends were going through. These standards of beauty just kept coming up," Davis said in an interview with the NNPA News Service. "I thought it was an issue that needed to be exposed more, although at times it seemed too taboo to talk about. But I thought a film would just put it all out there and cause discussion."
In realizing that so many dark-skinned girls have been told that lighter or Whiter skin is more beautiful, Davis decided to drive home her point by conducting the doll study.
"You could tell these people about the standards of beauty that are forced on young girls all you want to. But they won't get it until you show them," she said.
And that, she did.
The children are from a Harlem Day Care Center. And 15 of the 21 children surveyed preferred the White doll over the Black one, a results that has astounded many.
Clark and his wife Mamie Phipps Clark, also a psychologist, conducted the doll study in 1950 that showed how racial segregation destroyed the self-esteem of Black children. The Clarendon County, S. C. experiment involved 16 Black children, ages 6 to 9. They asked the children their perception of a White doll and a Black doll. Eleven of the students said the Black doll looked "bad" and nine said the White doll looked "nice".
The test results influenced the U. S. Supreme Court to hold school segregation to be unconstitutional in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans. case. Arguing against the separate-but-equal doctrine in 1952, Thurgood Marshall, then an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, cited Clark's work as proof of the doctrine's damage to the self-image of Black children. On May 17, 1954, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the court's decision to desegregate schools in Brown v. Board of Education. Clark's doll test was one of his citations as proof of the psychological damage on Black children.
The Davis test shows that psychology has not changed very much at all.
"I'm really not shocked, I am sad to say," says Julia Hare, a San Francisco psychologist. "If you keep doing what you've always done, you're going to keep getting what you've always had. Our children are bombarded with images every day that they see on television screens and on coffee tables either the light-skinned female that everybody is pushing or they give preference to the closest to White images."
Davis' film also features brief interviews with four teens who object to having been stereotyped as less intelligent or uglier simply because they do not meet the expectations of advertisers' perceived standards of beauty.
That White-is-right image is also projected through music.
"Look at our rap artists and entertainers, and not just the Lil' Kims and the Beyonces," says Hare. "Their skin is getting lighter and lighter and they're getting blonder and blonder."
Gail Wyatt, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, says she would recommend to any parent to instill racial pride into their children well before pre-school.
"Youngsters come into their homes making disparaging remarks about being brown or African-descended or about nappy hair," says Wyatt. "It is a definite concern of any parent. We want to know how our children can grow up in their own skin. We can't leave that part of a child's development to the school system or the neighborhood."
Children should be socialized between the ages of 2-4 to understand culture and skin color, Wyatt says. "They should be taught a concept of beauty and a context of ancestry."
Kiri's mother, Ursula Davis, an education consultant, says educating her daughter and instilling pride about her heritage was a high priority around the home.
She says that when Kiri was in pre-kindergarten, enjoying the tales of Cinderella and Snow White, she once said out loud at school that she wanted to be a princess, too.
A little friend, a Hispanic boy, quickly dispelled her dream. He told her she couldn't be a princess because she was Black and that only White girls were princesses.
For a while, Kiri believed her little friend - but not for long.
"She grew up with African art around her. We took her to an exhibit in the Smithsonian about Black women in Washington, D.C.," Davis recalls. "She began to read veraciously about Black heritage and African-American studies...She has immersed herself since she was very young and we've immersed her in the celebration of who she is."
And it has obviously paid off as Kiri looks forward to a future in filmmaking that will also instill pride.
"I almost accepted it at first," says the teenager, recalling the childhood exchange. "Now I only want to make films that are about issues that are of importance to me, films that don't show the stereotypes."
Some parents say their children are bombarded with countless negative images each day and that it takes a special effort to compete with those images.
"I make sure I know what they see and what they watch on television. And many times we are watching things together," says Alethea Holland, a Washington, D.C. mother of three daughters ages 7, 9 and 15. "And I give them each a mirror and I try to make them look in the mirror and appreciate their beauty and I make sure that they hear what I say; not what other people say - especially at school."
Sandra Cox, director of the Coalition of Mental Health Professionals in Los Angeles and a past president of the Association of Black Psychologists, says the short film clip may have understated the problem.
"I believe if any of us out here [on the West Coast] were to do the same study, it would be still worse," she says. "Hollywood created the standard."
http://www.louisianaweekly.com/weekly/news/articlegate.pl?20060821b
Method
In Rosenthal's study the participants included all the students in the first through six grades. Each student was given an IQ test called the Test of General Ability (TOGA), but the teachers were told that the students were taking the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition which would identify which students would bloom more rapidly academically. The experimenters chose the TOGA because it was a nonverbal test in which the score was not dependent upon the students’ mastery of such school-learned skills as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Another advantage of using this test was that it was more likely that the teachers would not be familiar with it. After the children were tested teachers were given results of those who scored in the top twenty percentile, but the names of the students who scored highly were not based on tests instead the names were randomly chosen. Near the end of the year, the same IQ test was given once again to the students. This was done to measure significant changes in those students the teachers were told were brighter as compared to those students that were not.
Results
For the most part, the students who were identified as the top twenty percentile had shown an increase in IQ greater than those who were not identified as “bloomers”. For the entire school, the students thought to be “gifted” averaged a 12.2 increase in I.Q. while the rest only averaged an 8.2 increase. This phenomenon was more pronounced in the first and second grades and nearly nonexistent in the fifth and sixth grade. Other grade levels did not show a distinctive relation between teachers’ expectations and students’ performance. Rosenthal also looked at the percentage of first- and second-grade students with major gains in I.Q. perhaps to emphasize the much higher increases in levels of I.Q. among those students thought to be gifted.
Discussion
Rosenthal suggested that this happened because perhaps children are thought to be more malleable or because students did not have established reputations yet. Rosenthal also suggested that students in the lower grades might be more susceptible to subtle changes the teacher makes to encourage successful performance. Although Rosenthal did not elaborate, he mentioned that lower-grade teachers may communicate their expectations of students better or more clearly than the upper-grade teachers. Overall the importance of Rosenthal's and Jacobson's study was that an individual’s expectation does in fact affect the outcome of the subjects’ performance. Rosenthal and Jacobson were able to support the hypothesis. The only limitations or problems were the fact that older students did not show such an increase in IQ scores.
Subsequent research done by Chaiken, Singler, and Derlega involved using videotape to capture teachers interaction with students that had been identified as bright students. These interactions revealed that teachers smile and make more eye contact with bright students while other students are treated in a generalized standard manner. As a result those students who teachers have higher expectations of generally do better which proves the correlation between expectations and performance. The biggest study was at the "Oak School", an otherwise unidentified United States primary school. Teachers were deceived into believing that a set of one fifth of their class were expected to develop much faster than the rest, as measured by IQ points. In fact, this set was randomly selected, or rather selected by stratified random sampling, giving a better guarantee that the participants were extremely similar in both mean and variation to the rest of the class. The main measure was a kind of IQ test, administered at the start of the school year (pretest) and at four months (end of first semester), eight months (end of second semester and of first year of school), and 20 months (end of second school year with a different teacher). Maximum overall effect was found at eight months, but a lot of gain was still present at 20 months. There was a big effect on first and second grade children by the end of the first year. By the end of the second year, much of the improvement differential had disappeared from those classes, but in other classes positive effects had emerged for the first time. Girls and boys gained in somewhat different ways (verbal vs. reasoning subscales). The advantage was true of pre/post testing using an IQ test. It was also true of teacher assessments, e.g. reading grades, which showed a big effect with the third grade group as well. They also did blind re-testing of a sample by an examiner who was not the teacher and who didn't know which were supposed to do well; here they got results showing a greater difference. Another effect was that pupils in the control group who improved against expectation were disliked by teachers, or at least showed signs of conflict with them. This is the biggest and most careful study. Besides primary school pupils, it has also been shown for algebra at the United States Air Force Academy and for university students as well.
http://www.answers.com/topic/pygmalion-effect
The child, a preschool-aged Black girl, quickly picks up and shows the Black doll over a White one that is identical in every respect except complexion.
"And why does that look bad?"
"Because she's Black," the little girl answers emphatically.
"And why is this the nice doll?" the voice continues.
"Because she's White."
"And can you give me the doll that looks like you?"
The little girl hesitates for a split second before handing over the Black doll that she has just designated as the uglier one.
This was not the 1954 doll test used by pioneering psychologist Kenneth B. Clark to help make the case for desegregation in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated public schools. Rather, it was a doll test duplicated in Harlem, N. Y., last year, more than a half-century after Brown. To the chagrin of parents and psychologists across the nation, the results were unchanged.
The test is again in the news because of an 8-minute documentary produced by 17-year-old film student Kiri Davis of Manhattan's Urban Academy who participates in the Reel Works Teen Filmmaking program, a free after school program supported by HBO.
The video taped doll test resulted from a collection of writings Davis had compiled on issues of importance to Black girls in her high school. In that writing, she noticed that complexion was a recurring theme.
"I knew what my friends were going through. These standards of beauty just kept coming up," Davis said in an interview with the NNPA News Service. "I thought it was an issue that needed to be exposed more, although at times it seemed too taboo to talk about. But I thought a film would just put it all out there and cause discussion."
In realizing that so many dark-skinned girls have been told that lighter or Whiter skin is more beautiful, Davis decided to drive home her point by conducting the doll study.
"You could tell these people about the standards of beauty that are forced on young girls all you want to. But they won't get it until you show them," she said.
And that, she did.
The children are from a Harlem Day Care Center. And 15 of the 21 children surveyed preferred the White doll over the Black one, a results that has astounded many.
Clark and his wife Mamie Phipps Clark, also a psychologist, conducted the doll study in 1950 that showed how racial segregation destroyed the self-esteem of Black children. The Clarendon County, S. C. experiment involved 16 Black children, ages 6 to 9. They asked the children their perception of a White doll and a Black doll. Eleven of the students said the Black doll looked "bad" and nine said the White doll looked "nice".
The test results influenced the U. S. Supreme Court to hold school segregation to be unconstitutional in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans. case. Arguing against the separate-but-equal doctrine in 1952, Thurgood Marshall, then an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, cited Clark's work as proof of the doctrine's damage to the self-image of Black children. On May 17, 1954, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the court's decision to desegregate schools in Brown v. Board of Education. Clark's doll test was one of his citations as proof of the psychological damage on Black children.
The Davis test shows that psychology has not changed very much at all.
"I'm really not shocked, I am sad to say," says Julia Hare, a San Francisco psychologist. "If you keep doing what you've always done, you're going to keep getting what you've always had. Our children are bombarded with images every day that they see on television screens and on coffee tables either the light-skinned female that everybody is pushing or they give preference to the closest to White images."
Davis' film also features brief interviews with four teens who object to having been stereotyped as less intelligent or uglier simply because they do not meet the expectations of advertisers' perceived standards of beauty.
That White-is-right image is also projected through music.
"Look at our rap artists and entertainers, and not just the Lil' Kims and the Beyonces," says Hare. "Their skin is getting lighter and lighter and they're getting blonder and blonder."
Gail Wyatt, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, says she would recommend to any parent to instill racial pride into their children well before pre-school.
"Youngsters come into their homes making disparaging remarks about being brown or African-descended or about nappy hair," says Wyatt. "It is a definite concern of any parent. We want to know how our children can grow up in their own skin. We can't leave that part of a child's development to the school system or the neighborhood."
Children should be socialized between the ages of 2-4 to understand culture and skin color, Wyatt says. "They should be taught a concept of beauty and a context of ancestry."
Kiri's mother, Ursula Davis, an education consultant, says educating her daughter and instilling pride about her heritage was a high priority around the home.
She says that when Kiri was in pre-kindergarten, enjoying the tales of Cinderella and Snow White, she once said out loud at school that she wanted to be a princess, too.
A little friend, a Hispanic boy, quickly dispelled her dream. He told her she couldn't be a princess because she was Black and that only White girls were princesses.
For a while, Kiri believed her little friend - but not for long.
"She grew up with African art around her. We took her to an exhibit in the Smithsonian about Black women in Washington, D.C.," Davis recalls. "She began to read veraciously about Black heritage and African-American studies...She has immersed herself since she was very young and we've immersed her in the celebration of who she is."
And it has obviously paid off as Kiri looks forward to a future in filmmaking that will also instill pride.
"I almost accepted it at first," says the teenager, recalling the childhood exchange. "Now I only want to make films that are about issues that are of importance to me, films that don't show the stereotypes."
Some parents say their children are bombarded with countless negative images each day and that it takes a special effort to compete with those images.
"I make sure I know what they see and what they watch on television. And many times we are watching things together," says Alethea Holland, a Washington, D.C. mother of three daughters ages 7, 9 and 15. "And I give them each a mirror and I try to make them look in the mirror and appreciate their beauty and I make sure that they hear what I say; not what other people say - especially at school."
Sandra Cox, director of the Coalition of Mental Health Professionals in Los Angeles and a past president of the Association of Black Psychologists, says the short film clip may have understated the problem.
"I believe if any of us out here [on the West Coast] were to do the same study, it would be still worse," she says. "Hollywood created the standard."
http://www.louisianaweekly.com/weekly/news/articlegate.pl?20060821b
Method
In Rosenthal's study the participants included all the students in the first through six grades. Each student was given an IQ test called the Test of General Ability (TOGA), but the teachers were told that the students were taking the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition which would identify which students would bloom more rapidly academically. The experimenters chose the TOGA because it was a nonverbal test in which the score was not dependent upon the students’ mastery of such school-learned skills as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Another advantage of using this test was that it was more likely that the teachers would not be familiar with it. After the children were tested teachers were given results of those who scored in the top twenty percentile, but the names of the students who scored highly were not based on tests instead the names were randomly chosen. Near the end of the year, the same IQ test was given once again to the students. This was done to measure significant changes in those students the teachers were told were brighter as compared to those students that were not.
Results
For the most part, the students who were identified as the top twenty percentile had shown an increase in IQ greater than those who were not identified as “bloomers”. For the entire school, the students thought to be “gifted” averaged a 12.2 increase in I.Q. while the rest only averaged an 8.2 increase. This phenomenon was more pronounced in the first and second grades and nearly nonexistent in the fifth and sixth grade. Other grade levels did not show a distinctive relation between teachers’ expectations and students’ performance. Rosenthal also looked at the percentage of first- and second-grade students with major gains in I.Q. perhaps to emphasize the much higher increases in levels of I.Q. among those students thought to be gifted.
Discussion
Rosenthal suggested that this happened because perhaps children are thought to be more malleable or because students did not have established reputations yet. Rosenthal also suggested that students in the lower grades might be more susceptible to subtle changes the teacher makes to encourage successful performance. Although Rosenthal did not elaborate, he mentioned that lower-grade teachers may communicate their expectations of students better or more clearly than the upper-grade teachers. Overall the importance of Rosenthal's and Jacobson's study was that an individual’s expectation does in fact affect the outcome of the subjects’ performance. Rosenthal and Jacobson were able to support the hypothesis. The only limitations or problems were the fact that older students did not show such an increase in IQ scores.
Subsequent research done by Chaiken, Singler, and Derlega involved using videotape to capture teachers interaction with students that had been identified as bright students. These interactions revealed that teachers smile and make more eye contact with bright students while other students are treated in a generalized standard manner. As a result those students who teachers have higher expectations of generally do better which proves the correlation between expectations and performance. The biggest study was at the "Oak School", an otherwise unidentified United States primary school. Teachers were deceived into believing that a set of one fifth of their class were expected to develop much faster than the rest, as measured by IQ points. In fact, this set was randomly selected, or rather selected by stratified random sampling, giving a better guarantee that the participants were extremely similar in both mean and variation to the rest of the class. The main measure was a kind of IQ test, administered at the start of the school year (pretest) and at four months (end of first semester), eight months (end of second semester and of first year of school), and 20 months (end of second school year with a different teacher). Maximum overall effect was found at eight months, but a lot of gain was still present at 20 months. There was a big effect on first and second grade children by the end of the first year. By the end of the second year, much of the improvement differential had disappeared from those classes, but in other classes positive effects had emerged for the first time. Girls and boys gained in somewhat different ways (verbal vs. reasoning subscales). The advantage was true of pre/post testing using an IQ test. It was also true of teacher assessments, e.g. reading grades, which showed a big effect with the third grade group as well. They also did blind re-testing of a sample by an examiner who was not the teacher and who didn't know which were supposed to do well; here they got results showing a greater difference. Another effect was that pupils in the control group who improved against expectation were disliked by teachers, or at least showed signs of conflict with them. This is the biggest and most careful study. Besides primary school pupils, it has also been shown for algebra at the United States Air Force Academy and for university students as well.
http://www.answers.com/topic/pygmalion-effect