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Teacher Expectations of Giftedness and the Matthew Effect in Student Achievement

In a classroom experiment, teachers were told that a randomly assigned subset of students were "gifted." Those students went on to show significantly more academic progress than the rest of the class, despite no actual difference in ability. This is consistent with the Pygmalion effect: higher teacher expectations for the labeled "gifted" students led to better performance, and the resulting gap widens over time in the pattern described by the Matthew effect.

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Updated 2026-07-11

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Psychology

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Empirical Science

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