Partnership Pedagogy and the Pygmalion Effect in the Digital Learning Environment

Achieving successful interaction in the “teacher-student” system and constructively collaborating within it is an important task of modern education, which, starting in 2020, often takes place in the context of the digital learning environment (DLE). Solving this task today is linked to the pedagogy of partnership (joint activity between the teacher and student to achieve shared educational goals). The object of study also includes soft approaches that ensure students' success in learning. One such approach is the “positive attitude of the teacher,” which manifests in the Pygmation effect (a phenomenon where a teacher's expectations regarding a student's success influence their actual learning outcomes). While the pedagogy of partnership is actively studied in the context of DLE, manifestations of the Pygmalion effect have only been observed in traditional educational processes. The purpose of this study is to identify or disprove the connection between the pedagogy of partnership and the Pygmalion effect in DLE conditions. In this article, we specify the principles of the pedagogy of partnership that can be adapted to the DLE environment and explore the manifestations of the Pygmalion effect in student learning. We also present the results of our own study on the connection between the pedagogy of partnership and the Pygmalion effect in the DLE context. The pedagogical experiment involved students from two universities. We confirmed the Pygmalion effect in the study of the “Multimedia Technologies” course. Based on the experiment results, recommendations are provided for teachers who aim to achieve the Pygmalion effect when implementing the pedagogy of partnership in the DLE context.