class differences in achievement: internal

Question 1

Becker

Answer 1

60 Chicago high school teachers.
Based on interviews with 60 Chicago high school teachers, he found that they judged pupils according to how closely they fitted an image of the ‘ideal pupil

• The teachers saw children from middle-class backgrounds as the closest to the ideal, and working-class children as furthest away from it because they regarded them as badly behaved

Question 2

Hempel-Jorgensen

Answer 2

2 English primary schools
found these notions vary according to the social class make-up of the school
- largely working-class Aspen primary school, discipline was a major problem, the ideal pupil was defined as quiet, passive and obedient - that is, children were defined in terms of their behaviour, not their ability

• By contrast, the mainly middle-class Rowan primary school had very few discipline problems and here the ideal pupil was defined instead in terms of personality and academic ability, rather than as being a ‘non-misbehaving’ pupil, as at Aspen.

Question 3

Dunne and Gazeley

Answer 3

• schools persistently produce working-class underachievement because of the labels and assumptions of teachers
• interviews in 9 English state secondary schools, they found that teachers ‘normalised’ the underachievement of working-class pupils, unconcerned by it and felt they could do little or nothing about it, whereas they believed they could overcome the underachievement of middle-class pupils.
• major reason for this difference was the teachers’ belief in the role of pupils’ home backgrounds:
  they labelled working-class parents as uninterested in their children’s education, but labelled middle-class parents as supportive
• led to class differences in how teachers dealt with pupils they perceived as underachieving
• setting extension work for underachieving middle-class pupils, but entering working-class pupils for easier exams.
  Teachers also underestimated working-class pupils’ potential and those who were doing well were seen as ‘overachieving’.

Question 4

Rosenthal and Jacobson’s

Answer 4

• told the school that they had a new test specially designed to identify those pupils who would ‘spurt’ ahead
• in fact simply a standard 10 test. Importantly, however, the teachers believed what they had been told. The researchers tested all the pupils, but then picked 20% of them purely at random and told the school, again falsely, that the test had identified these children as ‘spurters’.
• On returning to the school a year later, they found that almost half (47 %) of those identified as spurters had indeed made significant progress
• suggest that the teachers’ beliefs about the pupils had been influenced by the supposed test results.