Pygmalion Effect and Education Networks: Evidence from Pakistan

While we have extensive evidence on the prevalence of gender bias in hiring, promotions and wages, we know less about the mechanisms underlying this bias. This research conducted a large-scale field experiment with 3,600 employees in 250 schools.

We study whether conveying student-specific teacher expectations of high effort and achievement affects academic performance. Working with over 280 classrooms in Pakistan, we randomize whether students (a) receive individual-specific teacher expectations; (b) are additionally randomly paired with a classmate and asked to encourage each other; (c) simply receive information about their last test score, or (d) receive no message at all. We find that teacher expectations increase math scores by 0.2σ and the effect persists after six months. Moreover, we find that the treatment effect is especially large for those who were predicted to perform the worst and who randomly received a more ambitious expectation. Additionally, pairing students raises scores by 0.27σ, but only for those whose matched peer is similar to them in terms of baseline performance or teacher expectations. Finally, information provision alone only increases scores by 0.2σ in the short term; this effect is primarily driven by schools with low parental literacy. Our findings show that teacher expectations can have large effects on student performance and their effect can be strengthened by leveraging classroom interactions.