The first psychologist to systematically study this was a Harvard professor named Robert Rosenthal, who in 1964, did a wonderful experiment at an elementary school south of San Francisco.
The idea was to figure out what would happen if teachers were told that certain kids in their class were destined to succeed, and so Rosenthal took a normal I.Q. test and dressed it up as a different test.
"It was a standardized I.Q. Test," he says, "Flanagan's Test of General Ability, but the cover we put on it, we had printed on every test booklet, said 'Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition.'"
Rosenthal told the teachers that this very special test from Harvard had the very special ability to predict which kids were about to be very special — that is, which kids were about to experience a dramatic growth in their I.Q.
