methods in context - using experiments to investigate education Flashcards
lab experiments and teacher expectations
several researchers have used laboratory experiments to investigate teacher expectations. e.g, harvey and slatin examined whether teachers had preconceived ideas about pupils of different social classes.
harvey and slatin found that lower class children were rated less favourably, especially by more experienced teachers. this study indicates that teachers label pupils from different social clauses and use these label pupils from different social clauses and use these labels to pre judge pupils potential.
ethical problems with lab experiments
lab experiments that do not involve real pupils have fewer ethical problems than those that do. harvey and slatin did not use real pupils, so no child suffered any negative effects.
however other experiments that have used real people raises ethical concern. young peoples vulnerbaility and their more limited ability to understand what is happening mean that there a greater problems of deception, lack of informed consent and psychological damage. these ethical concerns are a major reason why lab experiments pay only a limited role in ed ucational research.
the narrow focus
lab experiments usually only examine one specific aspect of teacher expectations, such as body language for example. this can be useful because it allows the researcher to isolate and examine this variable more thoroughly.
however, this means that teacher expectations are not seen within the wider process of labelling and the self fulling prophecy.
practical problems with lab experiments
there are practical problems in conducting experiments on teachers expectations in schools. schools are large, complex institutions in which many variables may affect teacher expectations
e.g, there expectations may be influenced by a wide range of variables such as class size, streaming, type of school etc.
artificiality with lab experiments
the artificiality in lab experiments may mean that they tell us little about the real world e.g harvey and slatin used photographs instead of real pupils.
field experiments and teacher expectations
concerns about lab experiments has led some sociologists to use field experiments located in real educational settings instead. rosenthal and jacobsons study illustrates the difficulties of using field experiments to study teacher expectations
a study of a field experiment - rosenthal and jacobsons
a study in a primary school were they said that they had a tests to see which pupils would ‘spurt’ ahead of everyone and succeed, but this was false. they Iq tested the whole school and at random selected 20% that would spurt ahead.
when they came back the spurters had improved and had gained 12 points more in the IQ test
ethical problems with field experiments
field experiments in education settings pose major ethical problems. it could cause children to be held back educationally.
field experiments work best when those invloved are unaware that they are in an experiment. yet this requires deception.
reliability in field experiments
it is unlikely that the original could be replicated exactly
