Serendipity35

You might have studied (or taught) the "Hawthorne Effect" at some point in your career. It came from research studies on worker productivity that were done between 1924 and 1933. The studies, which took place in the Hawthorne works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago, involved manipulating working conditions.

The researchers experimented with lighting, work breaks, wall colors, pay etc. Their results seemed to indicate that each change resulted in an increase of productivity for a short time, but as more time passed the increase disappeared. It seemed to hold for for individuals as well as the larger group of workers.

The interesting part comes a few decades later. In 1955, there was a reinterpretation of the original results. The new study asserted that the act of observing and studying the workers caused the changes to occur. It didn't matter what you changed. They dubbed this "the Hawthorne Effect."

In the 1970s this interpretation was also nixed. A number of studies showed that the original research and the 1955 reinterpretation was seriously flawed.

The phrase persists. Do a search - you'll find definitions like this from Wikipedia:

An experimental effect in the direction expected but not for the reason expected; i.e., a significant positive effect that turns out to have no causal basis in the theoretical motivation for the intervention, but is apparently due to the effect on the participants of knowing themselves to be studied in connection with the outcomes measured.

from Parsons (1974) we get:

"Generalizing from the particular situation at Hawthorne, I would define the Hawthorne Effect as the confounding that occurs if experimenters fail to
realize how the consequences of subjects' performance affect what subjects do."

I'm not that concerned with which interpretation is correct, but it does seem to me to have a simple correlation in improving education in the classroom.

Let's make the situation a class in writing. Which of these things would improve the performance (productivity) of the students? Laptops for everyone; new furniture; a redecorating of the room ; shorter class meetings; monetary rewards for their writing; notebooks, pens & coffee for everyone.

We would implement each and carefully monitor and survey the students' work. I suspect that each in turn would cause some improvement, but over the course of a K-12 year (180 class meetings - you really can't touch that kind of contact with a standard twice a week for 16 weeks college course) each would lose its hold.

But why?

It's because you are watching. It's because you seem to care about improving their performance. You're asking questions and watching what they do. You seem concerned. You're trying, so they are trying.

Once an English major, always an English major. For me, Hawthorne is Nathaniel and if the letter is "A" then here it stands for attention.

In science, you study that the "observer effect" - the changes that the act of observing has on the phenomenon being observed. So, observing an electron will change its path, because the observing light or radiation contains enough energy to disturb it, and students will perform better when they know someone is paying attention. No great theory. No thesis. Not even a Wikipedia entry. For those of you in the classroom, does it ring true at all?