Jere Brophy is a clinical and developmental psychologist, and has conducted research on teachers’ achievement expectations and related self-fulfilling prophecy effects, teachers’ attitudes toward individual students and the dynamics of teacher-student relationships, students’ personal characteristics and their effects on teachers, relationships between classroom processes and student achievement, teachers’ strategies for motivating students to learn (online). He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Chicago. His current work focuses on curricular content and instructional method issues involving teaching social studies for understanding, appreciation, and life application.

In his research Brophy does not shy away from the difficult, and through his work with IRT (the Institute for Research at U of Chicago) has surveyed teachers to determine what teachers wanted to learn more about. One answer to that question was how to teach problem students. Brophy and his colleagues interviewed 100 teachers to learn how they handled the 12 most common types of problem students. Although this was an extensive study Brophy was not totally satisfied, he then set out to triangulate the data he collected. Through a series of comparisons of the results to the literature as well as to the principles of the most successful teachers Brophy published a book entitled Teaching Problem Students (1996). Based on his research Brophy contends that socialization is central to child rearing, and to child management in school.

In 1998 Brophy published Motivating Students to Learn where he argues that students must take seriously the intended goals and outcomes of learning activities, and therefore must be taught to undertake these activities with serious engagement (online). According to Brophy it is very important that children see the value and the purpose of what they are learning (anchored instruction, Bransford). Setting realizable goals is also a key to successful students, and it is important that teachers understand this and assist their students in setting these realistic goals. Brophy contends that a positive relation exists between enthusiasm and achievement.