ShortCutstvBlog

Nutshell Studies: Khan (2011)

December 3, 2025

The concept of cultural capital has assumed increasing significance in the Sociology of Education in recent times and Khan’s ethnographic study of St. Pauls, one of America’s most-prestigious boarding schools, is a useful and interesting way to introduce students to both the concept and how to apply it to understand an important dimension of social inequality.

If you want to go into the topic in a little more depth, this recent post on Rethinking the Hidden Curriculum shows how Khan’s work can be applied to give a new lease of life to an ageing sociological concept…

Khan: Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (2011)

Illustration “The New Kid in Town”

Ellie, 17, arrives on a scholarship to St. Paul’s, to one of America’s elite boarding schools,. The campus with its sprawling manicured lawns, historic buildings and students who project effortless confidence, feels a world away from her previous school. Although she comes, by most people’s standards, from an affluent middle-class family, she feels out-of-place among peers whose parents – CEOs of major companies, national politicians, media celebrities – are seriously wealthy and can easily afford the $70,000 a year fees.

Keenly alert to the differences in her life and theirs, she notices how her classmates glide through conversations. At lunch, they casually mention summer internships with global tech companies, skiing trips to the French and Swiss Alps, backpacking in South America and the endless family parties attended by leading politicians, business leaders and film stars whose names Ellie knows well. Unlike her new friends she’s not (yet) on first-name terms with these people because she’s never had the opportunity to meet them. Strangely enough, these things don’t sound to Ellie like they’re said to impress: they’re simply the matter-of-fact minutiae of the world through which her fellow students move.

In her English class, students debate global literature with ease. One boy links a novel to his travels in India, while another girl compares it to a documentary her family watched during a trip to Kenya. Ellie has read the book they’re discussing and she has her opinions about it but hesitates to speak, worried her ideas won’t sound as worldly.

In the common room, Ellie’s peers switch seamlessly between joking about pop culture to serious discussions about climate change. They seem comfortable with every topic, never awkward, always confident. She wonders how they’ve learned to be so adaptable.

The following week Ellie is invited to join a group heading into the city. They move through cafés, galleries and shops with practiced – and monied – ease. Ellie enjoys herself but notices how her new friends seem to belong everywhere they go, while she feels like she’s still learning the rules.

At night, Ellie writes in her journal. She’s proud of her hard work and knows she can keep up academically, but senses that success here isn’t just about grades. It’s about something harder to define: a way of carrying yourself, of fitting in, of seeming to be perfectly at home in any situation.

What Ellie is starting to learn is that studying hard is only part of the recipe for future success in the circles in which she’s now starting to move. Where she struggles in her new environment is in matching the soft skills – the “natural” self-confidence, wide cultural experiences and general ability to adapt easily to any social situation – her peers have been cultivating since childhood.

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Paper vs. Screen: The Medium Isn’t The Message

December 1, 2025

Although study-after-study has shown students find it much easier to understand text when it’s presented in a paper-based printed format rather than a screen-based digital format, the use of something like digital textbooks has grown exponentially over the past decade or so.

Proponents of screen-based technology have tended to argue digital learning is not only cheaper, more-flexible and versatile than it’s paper-based alternative, but that the measured difference in student comprehension and understanding between paper and screen is largely a function of cultural lag.

Fronty page of Hou et al research — Hou et al (2017)

The argument here is that while it exists now, at some point in the future the discrepancy will disappear because the difference is due to a materiality difference between paper and screen or, as Hou et al (2017) put it:

“The materiality of the reading medium influences text processing. Text on paper is touchable and tangible, whereas text on screens is intangible, mediated, and detached from the physical support of the reading medium. The haptic interactions with paper text [i.e. the feel of the material] afford readers richer sensorimotor engagement with the text compared to screen text, which enhances information encoding and comprehension”.

In other words, the feel of paper in our hands stimulates our senses and means the reader engages more-closely with the text. This, in turn, results in greater comprehension.

For digital evangelists this materiality-gain is something that will gradually disappear as education moves further and further online. As things currently stand most students still have the comparative experience of digital and non-digital text. At some point in the (near) future a generation of students will be educated solely with digital resources – and since they will have no memory or experience of paper, the materiality effect will simply disappear…

Which, all things considered, sounds plausible.

Except, what if the medium isn’t actually the message?

What if there are more-complex, more-fundamental, factors at play here?

Cognitive Maps

This is a question Hou et al. explored by way of arguing that the key reason students understand paper-based information more-thoroughly than the same information presented digitally is that our brains process information through a mechanism called cognitive mapping.

In a nutshell, the argument here is that the mental maps we build from the information we receive relies upon spacial cues and anchors that tie this information to our understanding. In other words, we understand more in the real world because that comprehension is anchored spatially by the physical dimensions of whatever we’re holding and reading.

For example, with a printed textbook we cognitively locate, map and anchor information across three dimensions of space: height, breadth and, most importantly, depth. In this instance, there are a range of spatial cues involved, such as where pages appear in the book (depth) and the position on the page of the individual words, sentences and paragraphs we read (height and breadth).

With the same information in digital format we lose some fundamental spatial cues – digital pages lack depth, for example – and hence anchors. It’s precisely because we find it more difficult to anchor digital texts in the same way we anchor non-digital texts that we tend to understand and recall less information digitally.

Unlike the materiality explanation, cognitive mapping poses much more fundamental problems for digital evangelists (and digital publishers) because it suggests the comprehension difference is a function of how our brains process information.

And that’s not something that will simply disappear over time.

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Rethinking the Hidden Curriculum?

November 27, 2025

The concept of a hidden curriculum is one that seems to belong to a bygone educational age – one in which we could be genuinely critical of hidden educational processes. In today’s educational system the hidden curriculum is not only no-longer hidden, it seems to have managed to force itself squarely to the front and centre of a generalised curriculum that covers not only formal knowledge but also a range of informal ideas about schools and schooling (looking at you “British Values”).

So, has the concept had it’s day? Is the hidden curriculum no-longer hidden? And if so, is the concept now redundant? Or has the hidden curriculum simply evolved in new and interesting ways, the understanding of which your students can exploit to impress examiners who probably thought they’d seen it all?

In “Life in Classrooms” (1968), Phillip Jackson introduced the then-radical notion of a “hidden curriculum”. The idea that pupils didn’t just learn a formal curriculum of “official knowledge” – what Dewey called the “things considered worthy of being known” – they also learnt an unofficial curriculum of concealed knowledge consisting of “unwritten, unintended and unofficial” ideas.

For Jackson, the hidden curriculum represented a reappraisal of the role of schools and teachers. It wasn’t taught by any single teacher or insitution, but rather emerged from the overall structure, routines and social organisation of schooling itself. It involved, first-and-foremost, informal learning that occurred through school routines, rules and expectations.

Considered radical at the time, the kinds of ideas Jackson saw as being implicitly taught as part of a hidden curriculum – strict and unquestioning obedience to authority, the importance of time management and personal routines, competition, individualism and conformity to school norms – have arguably become, in the 21^st century, normalised in State schools in Britain and America.

The hidden curriculum is, in other words, no-longer covert; it has become an integral part of an educational discourse that teaches “National values” and a “school ethos” involving competition, individualism, conformity to authority and the like as part of the overall curriculum.

So, the obvious question here is that if the hidden curriculum is no-longer hidden why do we still have to learn about it?

And the less obvious answer is that the concept itself is still relevant to understanding what goes-on in schools because we need to change how we think about the content of this hidden curriculum: how the “informal learning that occurs through school routines, rules and expectations” has changed over the years – something that involves co-opting Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of cultural capital.

It’s Official…

While many sociological concepts (norms, deviance, moral panics, patriarchy, identity, masculinity, class, gender, ethnicity…) have found their way into the mainstream lexicon, the concept of cultural capital has gone a major step further by being officially embedded in Ofsted’s officially Education Inspection Framework (2019).

While this interpretation sees the concept embedded into the formal curriculum as a set of practices (trips to museums, theatres and historical sites, exposure to literature, music and art beyond pupils’ immediate backgrounds and learning vocabulary, general knowledge and social skills that support academic and life success) research by Khan (2011) allows us to reconceptualise it as a new form of hidden curriculum.

Khan’s Academy

Khan’s (2011) ethnographic study of an elite American Boarding School demonstrates how it’s possible to update the concept of a hidden curriculum by demonstrating how it is an integral aspect of class reproduction – the process by which upper class parents ensure their children maintain their elite status, power and influence in spite of modern education systems that don’t actively discriminate against students of different social backgrounds.

In this respect Kahn’s research shows how Bourdieu’s three types of cultural capital (embodied, objectified and institutionalised) uniquely combine in the intersection between the home and the school. The St. Paul’s students in the study were, for example, an almost uniquely privileged group possessing high levels of embodied capital (how they spoke, the language they used, their cultural knowledge of things like art and literature) and objectified capital, from the physical and cultural goods they owned, through the labels they wore to the very school they attended.

And attending the right school is significant because institutionalised capital – the academic degrees, professional qualifications and certifications that legitimise and officially recognise certain skills and knowledge – isn’t simply a function of wealth. Although the privileged position these students occupied in American society began with their parents wealth – not many can afford $72,000 (£54,000) a year for their child’s education – this doesn’t automatically guarantee educational success. It still has to be achieved, regardless of your parents’ wealth – or poverty.

And this is where we can reintroduce the concept of a hidden curriculum.

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Understanding How Digital Environments Influence Behaviour

November 24, 2025

By Austin Page

These days, the digital world has become a second home for so many students. The average U.S. teen spends over 4 hours a day on their phones, nearly a quarter of their waking hours. That average is poised to go higher each year, as more and more innovations and let’s face it, distractions pop up on the web. Digital environments, whether intentionally or not, are influencing the behaviours of young people.

Instead of pushing students away from the online world, it might be more useful to bring parts of that world into the classroom. Interactive classrooms—where lessons mix traditional teaching with digital tools, displays, and real-time engagement—offer a practical way to do that. When used intentionally, they make learning feel more natural to students who are already used to digital environments.

To understand why interactive classrooms can be effective, it helps to look at what makes digital spaces so influential in the first place.

Why Digital Environments Capture Students’ Attention

Convenience

Digital tools are easy to switch into. Whether students are at home or in school, opening an app or joining a digital activity takes almost no effort. That familiarity lowers resistance and makes digital tasks feel normal.

Accessibility

In addition to convenience, digital spaces are now built for ease of use. Most digital platforms are built so anyone can use them quickly, even with low tech experience. In a classroom, this means students can participate without getting stuck on the mechanics.

Information

Sure it’s easy and convenient to use, but what’s the point of digital spaces if not to gain something? Students are used to getting answers fast. In an interactive classroom, teachers can pull up examples, visuals, or explanations right when they’re needed, matching the immediacy students expect.

Engagement Features

Polls, quizzes, interactive boards, and other digital elements keep students involved. These features mirror the digital environments students use daily—but here, they’re used to support learning instead of distract from it.

How Interactive Classrooms Help Teachers and Students

Interactive classrooms take what works in digital spaces and applies it to learning in a controlled, thoughtful way. Instead of competing with students’ attention habits, teachers can channel those habits toward something productive. And a big part of making this work is choosing the right AV solutions for interactive classrooms—tools that support engagement instead of creating extra steps or confusion.

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Welcome To The Biarchy…

November 19, 2025

As is their wont, A-level Sociology examiners occasionally like to ask questions about “feminist perspectives” and if you’re at all on the ball you’ll realise you probably need to discuss a range of approaches – usually, but not exclusively, radical, Marxist and liberal – depending on the complexity of the question and the length of your expected answer.

To cut a long story short, when discussing radical and Marxist perspectives, evaluation of the latter tends to focus around the idea that, since patriarchy predates capitalism, it is a much deeper, more-foundational, system of female oppression – one that will not, in simple terms, be resolved-away by a transition to communism.

To support your evaluation you’ll probably bring-in a range of classical radical feminists, such as Firestone (1970), Lerner (1986) and MacKinnon (1989) who have all argued, in their different ways, that male domination of women is historically rooted in patriarchal practices such as control over reproduction, sexuality and social organisation, that pre-dated capitalism by many thousands of years.

And you wouldn’t be wrong because the broad criticism holds true: while female emancipation from “capitalist” structures and strictures may be desirable, true emancipation cannot be achieved until patriarchy is, to coin a phrase, consigned to the dustbin of history.

And this kind of criticism will get you marks, along with all the other students saying much the same sort of thing.

But if you really want to stand out from the crowd, you need to critique the critique.

And there’s a couple of ways you can do this.

The first, fairly conventional, way is to acknowledge that while capitalism didn’t invent patriarchy it took it to new heights by reinventing women as unpaid domestic labourers with little or no pollical representation. The basic argument here is that capitalism and patriarchy are interlocking systems of oppression, whereby a (male) ruling class benefits in a multitude of ways from patriarchal norms and attitudes that consign women to a second-class status in contemporary capitalist societies.

More-recently, overt forms of female cultural exploitation have seen something of a revival in the form of the so-called Manosphere, a loose-knit conglomeration of online sites (webpages, blogs, podcasts…) dedicated to the propagation of misogynistic, anti-feminist, values.

A second, less-conventional, way is to introduce the concept of biarchy into the discussion.

Biarchival Evidence?

A biarchal model of gender relations challenges conventional patriarchal models by suggesting that some societies have been structured around a dual system of gender authority, one where both men and women hold power in ways that are complementary or balanced. In this respect, a biarchal society is one in which both genders share power and authority, frequently but not necessarily in distinct but equally-valued domains.

In simple terms, a biarchal system is one where gender roles are cooperative rather than hierarchical.

While this concept is not new, examples have tended to be from the relatively-recent past, such as some Native American tribes (the Iroquois in North Eastern America, for example), the Igbo in pre-colonial Nigeria and some Pacific Island societies such as Micronesia and, as with the Iroquois and Igbo, severely disrupted or completely overthrown by Western (patriarchal) colonisation.

More recent DNA-based evidence from the analysis of ancient bones however, has, Spinney notes, “made it possible to determine the sex of long-dead people, and to ask how they were related to each other…The picture emerging thanks to these new tools is that diversity in gender relations was very much the rule in prehistory”.

In other words, this new evidence has raised the interesting possibility that some ancient biarchal societies existed long before their patriarchal equivalents – and this, in turn, gives you the opportunity to raise some significant evaluative points:

Firstly, this evidence challenges the “universality of patriarchy” of argument. While patriarchy may pre-date capitalism, biarchy arguably predates patriarchy (or matriarchy, come to that).

Secondly, this idea lends support to intersectional analyses of gender relationships in the sense that a great deal of debate – feminist and otherwise – has focused on Western systems of gender inequality. By incorporating biarchal models into the debate you’re bringing non-Western societies into the debate.

Finally, in relation to general feminist theory the importance of biarchy is that it points towards the possibility of more-egalitarian gender relationships without having to confront the seeming inevitability of patriarchy.

References

Gerda Lerner: The Creation of Patriarchy, 1986.

Shulamith Firestone: The Dialectic of Sex,1970

Catharine MacKinnon: Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 1989.

Laura Spinney: Was Prehistory a Feminist Paradise?, 2025

Nutshell Studies: Felson and Cohen (1979)

November 10, 2025

Routine Activities Theory has arguably been one of the most influential crime theories of recent times and this Nutshell Study provides a simple overview for time-starved students who would nevertheless like to understand the basics of the theory.

If you fancy looking at RAT a little more critically we’ve got that angle covered for you too.

Felson and Cohen (1979): Routine Activities Theory (RAT)

Illustration: The Unattended Bike

It’s a warm Friday afternoon in a busy town centre and 17-year-old student, Mia, cycles to meet friends at a café. She’s running late, so she quickly locks her bike to a lamppost, but forgets to secure the front wheel and doesn’t double-check the lock. The café is situated in a small side-street, with no CCTV and few passers-by.

19-year-old Jake has recently dropped out of college and is struggling financially. He is, in Felson and Cohen’s words, a motivated offender. While he’s not actively looking to commit a crime he has stolen before and if a situation presents itself he’s always open to the opportunity.

He walks past Mia’s expensive bike and sees it’s lightly secured. It’s what Felson and Cohen call a suitable target – low risk and potentially high reward.. A quick check tells him there’s no CCTV, no security staff, police or pedestrians. He can’t be seen from the café. There is, in Felson and Cohen’s words, the absence of a capable guardian. Jake easily breaks the lock and pedals off without being seen or interrupted.

Mia returns an hour later to find the bike has gone…

Insights…

Crime is seen as situational, so the objective is not to explain why people become criminals but rather why do certain situations encourage or prevent crime?

Focused on people’s “routine activities”, how these have changed over the past 50 years and how these changes create crime opportunities. More women working, for example, means homes are more-likely to be empty during the day and this creates opportunities for burglary.

As Right Realists they rejected the idea structural factors, such as poverty and social inequality, encouraged crime. Rather, focus was on a combination of three factors:

1. A motivated offender: someone who, while not committed to criminality, was ready and willing to commit a crime when the risks were low.

2. A suitable target: people or objects that were both vulnerable and offered relatively risk-free opportunities.

3. A capable guardian: while this could take different human (police, neighbours, passers-by) and technical (CCTV, alarms, locks…) forms, the key thing is that a target was protected in some way.

If one of these factors was missing, crime was unlikely. Crime prevention should focus on situational controls such as creating “capable guardians” that make crime much harder for the individual.

Implications…

Perspective	Implication
Functionalism	RAT shifts the focus away from structures that propel people into crime (social strains, for example) towards the situational factors that create criminal opportunities. Focus less on why people offend and more on when and where offences are likely to occur.
Marxism	RAT ignores inequalities of class and power as factors in crime. It favours individualistic over structural explanations.
Interactionism	RAT over-determines the importance of situational factors in creating crime. By focusing on the “crime triangle” it fails to explain why some individuals – but crucially not others – are motivated to commit crimes.
Right Realism	RAT fits with Right Realist arguments that there are no “root causes of crime” and that crime can only ever be controlled, not eradicated. Focus on situational crime prevention measures rather than trying to change the conditions, such as poverty and inequality, that encourage crime
Left Realism	While both argue for the importance of crime prevention, RAT does not engage with any ideas that suggest crime has root causes like social deprivation or inequality.

Exam Tips and Where to Apply Them

Evaluate against other theories, particularly any kind of structural theory (Functionalist, Marxist, Left Realist). RAT provides an opportunity to argue that crime is situational not constitutional (rooted in structural causes like poverty).

RAT reflects Right Realist claim that crime does not have “root causes”. Certain social situations combine to create criminal opportunities.

Crime Prevention: RAT at the forefront of developing various forms of situational crime prevention techniques, particularly target hardening and environmental changes that “design out crime”.

Nutshell Studies: Young (2007)

November 5, 2025

Students (and teachers) of Left Realism should find the latest nutshell study particularly useful for the way it extends Young’s Realist arguments in a couple of interesting ways:

Firstly, the concept of subculture that features so prominently in the three-cornered approach to crime (the criminogenic triangle) is extended to include recent developments in online behaviours. This is a significant step towards acknowledging the increasing social significance of online communities and their role in crime and deviance.

Secondly, by posing the interesting contradiction between online cultural inclusion and real-world material deprivation (the latter, of course, being another key Left Realist theme) Young forges explicit links between Merton’s Strain Theory and Realist ideas about the social tensions that propel individuals into crime.

Young “The Vertigo of Late Modernity” (2007)

Illustration: “The Maze of Modern Life”

Joe is 18 years old, lives in a tower block with his parents and two sisters and spends most of his time online. His Instagram feed is filled with influencers showing off designer clothes, luxury holidays and perfect bodies, but the zero-hours shifts he works at a local fast-food chain leaves him with little or no spare cash once the bills have been paid. His family struggles financially. He struggles financially and his lack of educational qualifications makes it unlikely he’s ever going to land a job that will give him the financial freedom he needs to start a family.

He feels anxious, invisible and stuck, but Joe wants to belong.

He buys branded trainers on credit, posts filtered selfies of the best life he’s living and joins online groups that hold out the promise of status and respect. He repeatedly hears he can “be anything”, if he “just believes” and can find the right hustle.

His reality is very different to the life he desires.

Offline, he’s excluded: from higher education, stable work and a house of his own. He starts skipping shifts, argues constantly with his parent and starts hanging out with a local group he met online who talk about “how to hustle” and the “easy money” to be made from normies and muggles…

Joe’s experience reflects what Jock Young calls “the vertigo of late modernity” – a disorientating mix of online cultural inclusion and offline social exclusion.

Insights…

Young argues that late modernity (or what some writers call “postmodernity”) is a time of rapid social, cultural and technological change that creates a general sense of uncertainty around work, relationships and individual identities.

In particular, the disjunction between the rapid technological changes that have opened-up a new universe of cultural inclusion – everyone is invited to follow their dreams, consume the latest fashions and trends and find a sense of identity and belonging in brands and media – and the social exclusion that results from a real-world denial of access to secure jobs, educational opportunities, affordable housing and face-to-face relationships.

The contradiction between cultural inclusion in a virtual world and social exclusion in the real world creates ontological insecurity: the concept, originally coined by the radical psychiatrist R.D.Laing (The Divided Self, 1960) and developed sociologically by Anthony Giddens (Modernity and Self-Identity, 1991) refers to “a deep sense of uncertainty about who we are, how the world works, its stability and predictability”.

In this respect, although crime and deviance frequently have their roots in poverty and social deprivation, Young argues that in late modernity they are increasingly a response to the existential pressures created by ontological insecurity. The metaphor Young uses to express this idea – the vertigo of late modernity – describes the idea that many young people feel as if they are continually being pushed and pulled in a multiplicity of different directions that leaves them feeling dizzy and unable to find solid ground in their lives.

Symbolic inclusion coupled with material exclusion creates a tension that many can only resolve through crime.

Implications…

Perspective	Implications
Marxism	Young’s Left Realism doesn’t dispute ideas like class inequality and social exclusion are drivers of crime, but adds the pressures generated by cultural inclusion as a new factor in understanding criminality.
Functionalism	Directly challenges the idea of shared norms and values as a form of social glue. Late modernity creates fragmented values, normative confusions and unstable personal and social identities.
Strain Theory	Young’s arguments refence strain theory and the tensions between cultural inclusion (Merton’s “American Dream”) and the reality of social exclusion through low-skill, low paid work.
Interactionism	By introducing questions of identity struggles and individual meaning Young adds an Action dimension to Left Realism.
Postmodernism	While many of the concepts Young employs – social and cultural fluidity, uncertainty, media-driven identities – would be familiar to postmodernists, Young, like Giddens, argues we live in late modernity, rather than postmodernity.
Left Realism	While crime is still seen to be rooted in a combination of relative deprivation, political marginalisation and subculture, the latter is extended through the concept of online cultural inclusion.

Exam Tips and Where to Apply Them:

In addition to adding a new dimension (the contradiction between cultural inclusion and social exclusion) to Young’s Left Realism this work can be used to illustrate how strains and tensions in

late modernity creates unstable identities that are often resolved through criminal behaviour.

Young’s ideas can be linked to wider ideas about crime, criminality and the role of (social) media, inequality and social change.

Critically, compare the similarities and differences between Young’s work and Merton’s (1938) Strain Theory of crime.

Nutshell Studies: Bourdieu (1977)

October 20, 2025

Another Nutshell Study to add to your growing collection (use the right-hand “Categories” menu to find any you’ve missed), this one digests the work of Pierre Bourdieu “Cultural Capital” (2007).

As ever the Nutshell involves an everyday example to help you understand the basic idea followed by Insights into the concept, how it can be applied to different sociological perspectives and a couple of possible exam-type applications.

Bourdieu: Cultural Capital (1977)

Illustration “The Museum Trip That Meant More Than It Seemed”

Two Year 9 students, Amelia and Brian, go on a school trip to a museum of modern art. Amelia, whose parents are university lecturers, confidently discusses the exhibits with her teacher, referencing artists her parents admire and using sophisticated vocabulary to explain what she likes, dislikes and why.

Brian, whose parents are both shop workers and have never visited a museum, is much less familiar with the formality of his surroundings and feels out of place – “a bit like a fish out of water” as he puts it. He is confused by the art and struggles to engage with it. When asked about them by his teacher he describes the sculptures as “weird” and questions how the “dots and squiggles” displayed on the walls were any different to those he made when he was a very young kid.

Both students are bright in their different ways, but Amelia’s familiarity with abstract concepts, academic language and cultural institutions like museums gives her a clear advantage in her education. Teachers unconsciously interpret her style as “intelligent” and “perceptive” while Brian’s response is seen as “immature.”

Insights

Cultural Capital explains how middle-class students gain an advantage in education through their easy familiarity with the dominant (middle-class) cultural norms and expectations of the school.

Cultural Capital refers to things like the knowledge, language, tastes and behaviours that we all possess through growing-up in a particular society. While everyone has cultural capital, the problem, in the education system, is that teachers and examiners value some forms above others. Middle-class students have a cultural advantage over their working-class peers because the capital they own (how they speak, the things they like, how they behave and so forth) is recognised by schools as valuable. It can be “spent” in ways that give middle-class families an unseen advantage in education as in life.

To develop the idea further and apply it to specific instances we can talk about different aspects of cultural capital:

Embodied capital involves intangibles like levels of self-confidence and depth of vocabulary that develop as an integral part of the individual’s life.
Objectified capital relates to levels of access to valuable cultural resources, from books to computers to art.
Institutionalised capital refers to things like qualifications, credentials and status (attending a prestigious school…) that generate further, symbolic, forms of cultural capital that can be “spent” in later life (the “right degree” from the “right university” gives you access to certain jobs).

Habitus refers to the situations within which people live and how they internalise ideas and dispositions that are shaped by their social background. Amelia’s confidence and analytical style, for example, reflects a habitus aligned with academic norms and expectations, while Brian’s reflects a very different cultural milieu to that found in schools.

Field: Education is a social space (“field”) where some forms of capital are valued more than others. While economic capital might be crucial, for example, in ensuring your child attends a particular kind of school, different forms of cultural capital are more-valued than others within schools themselves. Theoretical knowledge, such as the ability to write an essay, for example,

is generally more-valued than practical knowledge, such as the ability to build a desk

In some school contexts, however, the reverse is sometimes true: practical knowledge, such as the ability to run very fast or throw and catch a football better than anyone else may be a form of cultural capital more-highly valued than theoretical knowledge.

Symbolic Violence: The education system implicitly legitimises middle-class culture as “superior” and desirable and symbolically devalues working-class styles of expression as “inferior” forms. The notion of “compensatory education”, where working class children are “compensated” for the perceived deficiencies of their cultural background by being exposed to things like “classic literature and music” is one form of symbolic violence.

Reproduction of Inequality: As with other forms of capital, such as economic or social, those students whose cultural capital most closely aligns with that of the school receive the greater rewards in terms of educational qualifications. While schools have the appearance of meritocracy they actually serve the purpose of reproducing class advantages (cultural reproduction).

Implications

Perspective	Implication
Marxism (Bourdieu)	Education is a form of cultural reproduction. Schools advantage upper and middle class children, at the expensive of their working class peers, by rewarding their cultural fit with school cultures.
Interactionism	A hidden curriculum of teacher expectations, about cultural categories like class, gender and ethnicity, and classroom interactions shape student outcomes.
Functionalism	Bourdieu challenges the claim schools are meritocratic systems: success, he argues, depends more on cultural familiarity and competence than ability.
Feminism	Can be extended to explore how cultural capital intersects with gendered expectations and subject choices.

Exam tips and Where to Apply Them:

Use different forms of cultural capital (embodied, objectified, Institutionalised) to demonstrate your understanding of different forms of educational inequality.

Role of Education: Use cultural capital to question the idea of meritocracy.

Differential educational achievement:Use cultural capital as a way to criticise explanations like material and cultural deprivation.

Subject choice: Link differences in subject choice post-16 to differences in cultural capital and teacher / parent / peers expectations.

Nutshell Studies: Archer et al. (2010)

October 19, 2025

The latest Nutshell Study digests the work of Archer, Hollingworth and Mendick: “Urban Youth and Schooling” (2010), so you don’t have to. Think of it as a handy way to expand your knowledge of a wide-range of sociological studies in as short a space of time as possible.

Something that’s either a brilliant way to develop a strong academic background over the course of two years of study or a last desperate attempt to make something stick before the exams because, if you’re being honest, two years of partying wasn’t actually conducive to learning in the way you’d hoped…

Archer, Hollingworth and Mendick: “Urban Youth and Schooling” (2010)

Illustration: “Style, Status and Schooling at Hillside Academy”

At Hillside Academy a small group of Year 10 students have achieved some small level of notoriety for their bold fashion choices, confident attitudes and strong social media presence on channels like Instagram and TikTok. One of the group, a design-student called Leah, posts videos about her fashion choices and how they are received by other students at the school. Her friend and co-conspirator in a number of “filmed happenings”, Tymon, frequently jokes about “getting rich without needing school” while his best friend Khali lives by the mantra “You’ve got to have style – that’s how people rate you.”

Teachers tend to interpret their behaviour as “distracted” “image-obsessed” and “lacking ambition”, but these students are deeply engaged in identity work – they are navigating status, aspiration and belonging in a context where academic success feels disconnected from their lived realities. Their rejection of conventional school norms isn’t about being pro-or-anti school, it’s a strategic negotiation of identity in a rapidly-changing world where success is increasingly defined differently to how it’s been defined by previous generations.

Insights

Performative Identity: Many young people actively construct identities through their conscious adoption of different styles and consumption patterns. Performative identity, therefore, refers to the idea that our sense of self (“who we believe ourselves to be”) is neither natural nor not fixed. Rather, identities are continuously constructed and expressed through how we act and interact with others. Identity is something we do rather than something we are. The construction of performative identities frequently brought students into tension and conflict with school expectations.

Symbolic Capital: This type of capital – closely related to the cultural type – is normally associated, in an educational context, with things like academic qualifications. It can, however, also relate to social status earned, in this instance, through something like style and social media following. While meaningful within the context of youth culture, it’s not particularly valued by schools.

Classed and Gendered Aspirations: While student aspirations are shaped by social class, gender and cultural narratives, late modernity opens up different routes to “success”, for working class and female students in particular, than the conventional academic route. While “class, gender and ethnicity continue to shape opportunities in education and work, this happens in an increasingly hidden way…”

Misrecognition by Schools: Teachers often misinterpret behaviour as simple disengagement from school, but often fail to see the complex identity work and alternative aspirations at play in their students’ behaviour.

Challenge to Meritocracy: The study questions the inability of schools and teachers to both recognise and respond to diverse forms of ambition and success, particularly among working-class and minority youth, in ways that embrace and encourage difference.

Implications

Perspective	Implication
Interactionism	Highlights how identity is negotiated through peer culture, teacher feedback, and symbolic expression.
Cultural Capital (Bourdieu)	Expands the concept to show how symbolic forms of capital (especially those related to style and self-confidence) are hugely important in the lives of many young people while being ignored or devalued by schools.
Feminism / Intersectionality	Explores how categories like class, age, gender and ethnicity intersect (overlap and combine) to shape aspirations and identity performances.
Postmodernism	Emphasises the fluidity and fragmentation of identity and holds that official definitions of “success” no longer hold in postmodernity. There are many more ways to achieve success than the single route (academic achievement) promoted by schools.
Education Policy	Raises interesting questions about social inclusion, the meaningful recognition of diverse aspirations and the organisation and purpose of schooling in the 21^st century.

Nutshell Studies: Merton and Strain Theory (1938)

October 17, 2025

The third Nutshell Study is Merton’s Strain Theory (1938 ), designed “to make it easier for students to get to grips with significant classic and contemporary sociological studies in a simple, straightforward, way that doesn’t involve a shed-load of frankly quite time-consuming reading”.

Nutshell Studies give you a broad outline of a study – more than enough for all your exam-related needs – broken-down into three short sections (not to mention a bonus “Exam Tips and Where to Apply Them” section. So I won’t).

1. Illustration: This provides an everyday example to illustrate the basic ideas the author of a study is trying to get across. Think of this section as a simple way to understand the more-sociological content of:

2. Insights: This is a short list of the key ideas put forward by the author. It’s purposely-designed to be short, sweet, snappy and memorable.

3. Implications: The 3^rd and final section provides a quick list of the implications the featured findings have for a range of broad sociological perspectives, something that can be useful for comparative / evaluative purposes.

Disclaimer

Nutshell Studies should in no-way be considered a substitute for reading the actual study. But, having said that, needs must, hey?

Merton: Strain Theory (1938)

Illustration

Jamie is in his final year at his extremely prestigious, very expensive, school. Both his parents are medical professionals – one a highly-paid surgeon, the other a partner in a General Practice – and they are determined Jamie should follow in their footsteps. They are living what Merton called “The American Dream” and from a young age they’ve instilled in their son the conventional cultural values that success means getting top grades at school, attending an Ivy-League university and from there moving into a high-paying job that “gives something back to the community”.

As his final exams approach, however, things start to go a little awry for Jamie. He’s starting to party a little too hard and drink just a little too much with his friends – not enough to get him into trouble with his school or family, but just enough for his teachers to notice his grades are slipping. He’s not likely to fail, but his grades won’t be sufficient to get him where he wants to be post-school. His recent relationship with – and messy break-up from – a girl two years his junior also hasn’t helped and he’s starting to realise that his parents marriage isn’t as rock solid as everyone in the family likes to pretend.

Jamie’s legitimate means to success – gaining the qualifications he needs to achieve his ultimate goals – was in danger of being blocked until, arriving in his tutor’s office for a lesson, he noticed their computer password scribbled on a note on the desk. Later that day mainly, he told himself, out of curiosity, he used the password to enter the school’s examination system, where he discovered the upcoming papers for the exams he was about to sit.

A few weeks later Jamie achieved one of the highest exam pass rates his school had ever seen.

Insights

Merton argues that societies such as America and Britain promote cultural goals like wealth and status as being desirable, but then systematically limit access to the legitimate, institutionalised, means to achieving them, such as educational qualifications or stable, well-paid, jobs. When individuals experience this disconnect between what society tells them they should have and their inability to achieve these goals they experience strain – an uncomfortable social and psychological situation they can only resolve by adapting in one of five ways:

Conformity: accept the goals and the means to achieve them.
Innovation: accept the goals but reject the legitimate means (through, for example, crime means)
Ritualism: reject the goals but accept the means (people in dead-end jobs, for example, just “going through the motions”).
Retreatism: reject both goals and means (dropping out of the job market, for example )
Rebellion: reject both the current goals and the means to achieve them (by creating new and different goals and means).

In Jamie’s case he gained the success he was under such pressure to achieve using innovative (if illegitimate / criminal) means to achieve it…

Implications

Perspective	Implications of Strain Theory
Functionalism	Explains how deviance reinforces social norms; adaptations show how individuals responds to social strains
Interactionism	Argues strain theory overlooks how deviant labels shape our identity; focuses on structural causes rather than how individuals choices / actions shape behaviour. Assumes “success” is only measured in economic terms. People can develop a variety of personal ideas – many of them non-economic – about what constitutes “success”. “Strain”, therefore, does not affect everyone in the same way.
Neo-Marxism	Ignores non-economic forms of inequality, such as age, gender and ethnicity.

Exam Tips and Where to Apply Them

Labelling Theory would emphasise the social construction of deviance, rather than blocked goals.

General Strain Theory (Agnew) addresses many of the perceived deficiencies in (economic) strain theory to include strains relating to general categories like age, gender and ethnicity, as well as specific forms of strain created through things like personal loss and negative personal relationships.

Nutshell Studies: Alexander (2010)

October 15, 2025

The second Nutshell Study does a quick’n’dirty hack-job on Michelle Alexander’s 2010 study “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” – the idea being, as with everything in this series, “to make it easier for students to get to grips with significant classic and contemporary sociological studies in a simple, straightforward, way that doesn’t involve a shed-load of frankly quite time-consuming reading”.

Nutshell Studies give you the basic ideas in a handy bite-sized way that provides a solid source to back-up your exam arguments – to which end I’ve added a new section (Exam Tips and Where to Apply Them) to the familiar three related parts:

2. Insights: This is a short list of the key ideas put forward by the author. It’s purposely-designed to be short, sweet, snappy and memorable.

Disclaimer

Nutshell Studies are in no conceivable way a substitute for reading the actual study. But since we all know that’s not going to happen it’ll just be our little secret.

Alexander “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” (2010)

Illustration: “The School To Jail Pipeline For Black Youth”

Tyrone, an 18-year-old Black student from a low-income American neighbourhood, is stopped by police for a minor drug offence. Although this is relatively common among teens of all races, Black and Native American boys are more likely to be arrested and detained for cannabis possession than their white peers, even when usage rates are similar. The usual punishments for this type of offence involve diversion into drug education programmes, probation, or counselling.

For Black boys like Tyrone, however, it’s much more common for arrest to be followed by a plea deal and a felony conviction.

After prison, Tyrone cannot vote, struggles to get a job and is denied housing. Although he served his time in prison for an offence his white peers are rarely imprisoned, society treats him like a second-class citizen in ways that impact negatively on the rest of his life.

it’s part of a system that quietly re-creates

Alexander argues this experience isn’t an isolated case involving “rogue individuals”; it’s a pattern of behaviour repeated across the United States that systematises racial segregation through mass incarceration – the so-called “the school to prison pipeline”. It is, she argues, how the criminal justice system creates a new racial underclass, in a way that mirrors the Jim Crow laws that operated from the end if the Civil War until the late 1960’s…

Insights…

Social Control: Alexander argues the American criminal justice system has systematically replaced old forms of racial control – such as the “Black Codes” created in many Southern States to restrict the rights (the type of work they could do, the wages they were paid) of newly freed African Americans during the Reconstruction Era – with a racialised caste system based on mass incarceration. Poor, black, youth are the New Underclass in this system.

The War on Drugs as a gateway to incarceration: Although drug use is similar across all ethnicities in America, Black communities are disproportionately targeted for arrest and imprisonment. The so-called “war on drugs” is, in this respect, a way for a racialised system of justice to operate “in plain sight”.

Legal discrimination post-prison: Once labelled as a felon, individuals lose their rights around voting, housing and employment and this creates a permanent underclass for whom crime and criminality may be the only way to survive. The system creates, in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy that both justifies and punishes “black criminality”.

“Colourblind” laws with racist outcomes: The American legal system, with its credo of “equality under the law”, becomes the perfect cover for discriminatory practices. While the laws themselves are not overtly discriminatory their enforcement and impact are deeply racialised: discrimination results from the way laws are selectively applied against some social groups but not others…

Implications…

Perspective	Implications
Marxism	The justice system serves ruling-class interests by controlling and excluding the poor.
Functionalism	Challenges the idea that laws maintain social order fairly. This shows both dysfunction and inequality.
Labelling Theory	Felony labels become master statuses, shaping identity and limiting life chances.
Conflict Theory	Highlights power struggles within societies where laws are selectively used to maintain power domination over marginalised groups.

Exam Tips and Where to Apply Them

Official crime statistics: Challenges the idea that crime rates reflect actual offending. Consider how enforcement bias affects the validity of official statistics as measures of crime and criminality.

Social control: Alexander’s work suggests one way institutions in democratic societies enforce and maintain inequality through legal means.

Ethnicity and crime: The study is a key critique of the idea the justice system is neutral. She demonstrates how racial assumptions and biases are built into the system.

Nutshell Studies: Francis et al. (2019)

October 14, 2025

The idea behind Nutshell Studies is to make it easier for students to get to grips with significant classic and contemporary sociological studies in a simple, straightforward, way that doesn’t involve a shed-load of time-consuming reading. Nutshell Studies are designed to give you the basic ideas in a handy bite-sized portion that provides a solid source to back-up your exam arguments – something that carries a lot more weight with examiners than vague references to “sociologists” or, worse still, “someone whose name I can’t remember”.

Nutshell Studies are divided into three related parts:

1. Illustration: This provides an everyday example to illustrate the basic ideas the author of a study is trying to get across. Think of this section as a simple way to understand the more-sociological content of:

2. Insights: This is a short list of the key ideas put forward by the author. It’s purposely-designed to be short, sweet, snappy and memorable.

3. Implications: The 3^rd and final section provides a quick list of the implications the featured findings have for a range of broad sociological perspectives, something that can be useful for comparative / evaluative purposes.

Nutshell Study: Francis, Taylor and Tereshchenko “Reassessing ‘Ability’ Grouping” (2019).

Illustration: “Set for Success at Milltown Academy?”

At Midtown Academy, from Year 7 students are placed into ability groups. The top sets are described as “gifted and talented” while lower sets are labelled “supportive learning groups.” Teachers insist the system helps tailor teaching to student needs. The higher set students benefit from work that stretches their abilities while those in the lower sets benefit from work that doesn’t make them feel excluded.

Imran however, a lower set student, notices his lessons focus more on controlling the behaviour of the class than academic content. He is never given challenging work and much of what he receives seems designed to keep him occupied rather than to test his abilities. He finds the work mundane, boring and uninteresting and his teachers interpret his lack of effort as inability. “They don’t expect us to do well”, he says. “It’s like we’re just here to behave”. Despite being told that opportunities exist to reassess their position, no-one in Imran’s set ever made it out into a higher set.

Sophie, in the top set, receives enrichment tasks, university visits, and praise for her “potential”. She’s entered for higher level exams and her teachers have talked about encouraging her to apply for Oxbridge.

The big question here is whether “grouping systems” like streaming, setting and banding reflect more than academic ability? Are “ability groups” simply the outcome of objective assessments of intelligence or do they encompass a range of hidden subjectivities around concepts like social class, ethnicity, gender and teacher bias?

Insights…

Francis, Taylor and Tereshchenko critically examined how grouping by perceived ability affects equity and student experience. Their Key Insights include:

Ability is a Socially Constructed Category: Grouping decisions are often based on subjective judgments, not objective measures, influenced by behaviour, social background and teacher expectations.

Reinforcement of Inequality: Lower sets disproportionately include working-class, Black, and minority ethnic students and reproduce the social disadvantages they are nominally designed to remove.

Differential Curriculum Access: Students in lower sets often receive a diluted curriculum, fewer opportunities and less challenging lessons. This both limits their academic potential and encourages the kind of “challenging behaviours” the process is supposed to eliminate.

Impact on Identity and Aspiration: Set placement, whether we like it or not, involves a labelling process that affects how students see themselves as students. Those in lower sets internalise feelings of inferiority, while top-set students gain confidence and status.

Call for Mixed-Ability Teaching: The authors advocate for inclusive pedagogies that challenge the myth of fixed ability and promote equity in learning.

Implications…

Francis, Taylor and Tereshchenko’s study has implications for a range of sociological perspectives:

Perspective	Implication
Interactionism	Highlights how teacher expectations and classroom interactions shape student identity and achievement.
Labelling Theory	Reinforces how set placement acts as a label that influences behaviour, confidence and outcomes.
Marxism	Shows how education reproduces class inequality through structural practices like setting.
Contemporary Education Policy	Raises questions about the fairness of ability grouping, the ethics of differentiated curricula, and the need for inclusive teaching strategies.

WHAT: Psychology GCSE Core Studies

October 7, 2025

If you’re looking for a relatively simple way to introduce your GCSE students to key psychology studies then the WHAT technique (“a strong, yet simple, way to help your students analyse and understand any research study”) should fit the bill nicely.

And if, for whatever reason, you’re not up-to-speed with the idea, the following link should tell you what’s WHAT.

And if you found that vaguely interesting you might be similarly vaguely interested in a follow-up post where I created a PowerPoint Presentation to outline the technique and provide a breakdown of a real study to allow teachers to demonstrate to students how the technique could be used. In this particular instance, once I got started I ended-up creating a Presentation covering 24 sociological studies that I called “Classic and Contemporary” for no better reason than the fact there are no prescribed (or “core”) studies in the A-level Specifications (AQA, OCR, CIE…).

Which is not the case with GCSE Psychology. Obviously.

Because if it was you can bet your bottom dollar I’d be calling this latest PowerPoint Presentation something a bit more catchy than Psychology GCSE Core Studies.

But since the AQA Specification is actually jam-packed with the Core Studies students need to have at least a nodding acquaintance with, my hand was forced into creating 26 slides covering the following “classic and contemporary studies”:

Bartlett: Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932) (War of the Ghosts)
Bartlett: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932) (Theory of Reconstructive Memory)
Gilchrist and Nesberg: Need and Perceptual Change in Hunger (1952) (Study of Motivation and Perception)
Murdock: The Serial Position Effect of Free Recall (1962) (Serial Position Curve Study)
Gibson: The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) (Direct Theory of Perception)
Gregory: Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing (1963) (Constructivist Theory of Perception)
Bruner and Minturn: Perceptual Identification and Perceptual Organization (1955) (Perceptual Set Study)
Piaget: The Origins of Intelligence in Children (1936) (Theory of Cognitive Development)
McGarrigle and Donaldson: Conservation Accidents (1974) (The Naughty Teddy Study)
Hughes: Egocentrism in Preschool Children (1975) (The ‘Policeman Doll’ Study)
Dweck: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006) (Mindset Theory of Learning)
Willingham: Why Don’t Students Like School? (2009) (Learning Theory)
Asch: Opinions and Social Pressure (1955) (Study of Conformity)
Milgram: Obedience to Authority (1963) (Agency Theory of Obedience)
Adorno: The Authoritarian Personality (1950) (Theory of the Authoritarian Personality)
Piliavin, Rodin and Piliavin: Good Samaritanism: An Underground Phenomenon? (1969) (Piliavin’s Subway Study)
Piaget: The Language and Thought of the Child (1926) (Theory of Language)
Sapir-Whorf: Theory of Linguistic Relativity (1929) (The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)
Von Frisch: The Dancing Bees (1927) (Bee Study)
Darwin: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) (Evolutionary Theory of Non-Verbal Communication)
James-Lange Theory of Emotion (1884, 1885)
Hebb: The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory (1949) (Theory of Learning and Neuronal Growth)
Penfield: Study of the Interpretive Cortex (1959)
Tulving: Episodic and Semantic Memory Localization Using Gold Radioactive Tracer and PET Scanning (1989) (The ‘Gold’ Memory Study)
Wiles et al: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as an Adjunct to Pharmacotherapy for Treatment-Resistant Depression (2013) (Study of the Effectiveness of CBT)
Kaij: Alcoholism in Twins (1960) (Twin Study of Alcohol Abuse)

As ever, I’ve included a one-click menu system so you can jump to the relevant study when you want to talk about it to your students without having to wade through loads of slides to find the one you need.

There are also a couple (three, actually) of bonus slides in the Presentation but I’ll leave you to discover what they are…

WHAT. More?

September 23, 2025

In a recent post I outlined the WHAT technique, a “strong, yet simple, way to analyse and evaluate any research study” by encouraging students to break any study down into 4 key areas:

What were the aims of the study?

How was the study carried-out?

Answers: what were the key findings of the research?

Takeaways: what were the main conclusions to draw from the study and its findings?

The basic idea behind the technique is to help students identify the key information about a study they can easily reproduce in an essay or exam – something you’ll already know because you’ve already read said blog post.

Anyway, I thought it might be useful to help teachers introduce the technique through a simple PowerPoint Presentation that both outlined the technique and provided a breakdown of a real study by way of demonstrating to students how it worked in practice. I also thought that since students have to study Education with Methods in Context an example drawn from educational research would be a good one to use. Not only do students get a quick ’n’ dirty overview of a classic study, they also get a bonus “methods” section to boot.

However, what seemed like a quick win-win scenario for all involved – you got a manageable two or three slide Presentation as an aid to explanation, I didn’t spend way-too-much-time designing and creating it – rapidly spiralled out of control as I thought of more-and-more absolutely essential studies that should be added to the list. Currently, therefore, there are 24 studies on the list: from classic studies like Durkheim’s “Moral Education” (2003) that laid-out many of the ideas crucial to a Functionalist understanding of the world, the role of the education system and the individual’s relationship to both, to Bowles and Gintis’ “contemporary classic” “Schooling in Capitalist America” (1976) that laid the foundations for more-recent kinds of Neo-Marxist interpretations of the role of education in modern societies, to contemporary studies by writers like Francis and their critical analysis of one of education’s most persistent myths – “ability” groupings

(more…)

WHAT About Social Research?

September 2, 2025

Encourage your students to engage with social research by using this simple template.

It’s probably no great secret that for the majority of sociology and psychology students research methods is probably the area of their course they find both the least interesting and most difficult to understand.

The two may or may not be connected.

One area in particular in which students invariably struggle is in their understanding of original research, mainly because it can present itself as difficult to manage and digest in ways that are student-friendly. College students, after all, are not the primary audience and few, if any, research studies make any concessions to this.

So, if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad it’s our job to help Muhammad get to the mountain. And climb it, if you’re interested in mixing your metaphors.

While I can’t promise to make the topic more interesting, there are ways to make it more understandable (which, in turn, may or may not make it more interesting), one of which is to use the Ikea Effect to help students build their knowledge and understanding in a way of their own choosing.

Albeit with your substantial behind-the-scenes help.

The Ikea Effect, in a nutshell, is the idea that people tend to value something more if they’ve played some part in creating it – even if, in the case of Ikea furniture, it’s just following a set of pre-printed instructions that lets you to assemble a factory-made bookcase, bed or bentwood armchair (nice…). It’s an effect that derives, in the main, from Festinger’s concept of “effort justification” – the idea that we tend to value things more if we’ve expended some effort in helping to create them.

Now, you may be thinking this is all-very-good-and-interesting (I could be wrong…), but what’s it got to do with research methods?

And the answer, in a roundabout way, is that if you can get your students interested in reading – and most-importantly understanding – research studies you’re going a long way towards both making methods more interesting and showing them how they can apply their knowledge and understanding of research studies to their advantage when it comes to impressing examiners.

As an added bonus, you can take-advantage of the Ikea Effect to encourage your students to value the work they do, by providing them with a set of pre-printed instructions that tell them exactly what they have to do to create a coherent and useful set of notes about a wide range of research studies.

WHAT?

What, you may ask, is WHAT?

It’s a strong, yet simple, way to analyse and evaluate any research study by creating a scaffold that forces your students to always think and write in terms of four distinct categories (think of it as a set of pre-printed instructions that guides students towards creating a comprehensive set of notes about any given research study):

What were the aims of the study?

Identify the key ideas the researcher/s examined.

How did they do it?

Identify the method/s used in the research and details of the sample, if applicable

Answers: What were the key findings of the research?

Identify the main results of the study.

Takeaways?

Identify the main conclusions can we / the researcher/s draw from the study and its findings

As you’ll see from the WHAT template I’ve so thoughtfully included in both pdf format and as a Word document, the basic idea is to get students to select the most important information they need from a research study. There’s not a great deal of space for each answer, so students need to think carefully about what they’re going to write and how they’re going to express it – something that will also come in handy when it’s time to revise.

Finally…

Once students know the WHAT of any research study they can use this information as the foundation for doing more interesting things, such as considering the strengths and limitations of a study or showing how it links to or deviates from the findings of other, similar, studies.

Inequality: Evaluating The Gender Pay Gap

August 28, 2025

What Is It?

The Gender Pay Gap (GPG) represents the difference between the median – or mid-point – earnings of men and women in a workforce in any given year. In basic terms it’s a comparison of the middle hourly earnings of all men and all women in a given workforce, such as Britain or America.

What It’s Not…

It’s not a comparison of male and female mean earnings – the total earnings of all men and all women divided by the number of men and women in the workforce. This is an average that’s easily distorted by economic outliers such as a much higher proportion of men in very highly-paid roles (such as company CEO’s or Investment Bankers) and a much higher proportion of women in relatively lower-paid roles (such as cleaners, retail assistants and care workers)

It’s also not a comparison of the relative levels of male – female pay for the same job (do female Investment Bankers or Care Workers get the same rate of pay as their male counterparts?)

What It Is…

It’s a broad (macro-economic) measure of the extent of structural social and economic inequalities in the way pay is distributed throughout an economy. As such, it allows us to track changes over time in the relative value of male and female labour. For example, over the past 50 years in Britain the GPG has declined significantly in response to a wide range of political, economic and cultural changes (that, in another context, you might want to explore at some point):

In 1975 the GPG was around 30 – 40% in favour of male workers.

By the mid-nineties the gap, although still substantial, had closed to between 20 – 25%.

In the early 2000’s the gap closed slightly to 15 – 19%

By 2020 the gap had closed to around 9% (for full-time employees). If part-time employment – something predominantly carried-out by women – is included the gap was around 17%.

Further changes in subsequent years has seen the GPG narrow to 7.5% in 2023 and 7% in 2024.

Or Maybe Not…

A recent study by Forth et al (2025) has placed a question mark over the validity of the statistical analysis used to calculate the Gender Pay Gap and, in particular, the representativeness of the sampling on which it’s calculation is based.

The main issue, according to Forth et al, is that “an annual sample 1% of employee jobs” designed to be representative in terms of gender, age, occupation, and region has tended to “under-represent jobs in small, young, private-sector organisations”. The upshot of this, the authors argue, is that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) “has been consistently under-estimating the UK GPG over the last 20 years, by a small but noteworthy margin of around 1%”.

Which, in the greater scheme of income inequality isn’t that much. Unless you’re the victim of such inequality.

But Then Again…

If you’re looking to impress an examiner with your ability to dig beneath the surface of social statistics to evaluate the things that most students simply take for granted, then maybe you could be on to something…

References

John Forth, Alex Bryson, Van Phan, Felix Ritchie, Carl Singleton, Lucy Stokes and Damian Whittard (2025) :“The Representativeness of the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings and Its Implications for UK Wage Policy”

Kalyeena Makortoff (2025) “UK gender pay gap underestimated for two decades, report says”: The Guardian

Introducing Research Methods: 3 New Films

August 15, 2025

This new 3-part series of films is designed to introduce A-level / High School students to research methods in a way that explains their importance to our general understanding of Psychology.

1. Why Study Research Methods? (3 mins)

Surveys have shown that research methods is students least favourite topic.

So why do we have to study them? This short film answers that question.

All psychological research uses research methods, so we can’t ‘know’ a study, until we also know about the research that produced it. This is why research methods are so important. Investing time learning about research methods pays great dividends.

It provides greater understanding of the studies we read about and, as we illustrate with Albert Bandura’s famous Bobo doll experiments, it helps evaluate a study, a skill examiners want to see in tests.

More Films…

Discovering Psychology: Updated Edition

August 14, 2025

This classic series of short – around 30-minute – psychology films narrated by Philip Zimbardo and aimed at an Introductory College / High School audience originally premiered in 1990 and is now available in an “updated edition” published in 2001. In this latter edition 17 of the 26 films were updated to include more-recent research – although from the current vantage-point of 2025 “more-recent” invariably means a little-bit-dated.

While this is obviously true of the presentation – from the hair and clothing styles to the featured technologies – it’s also true of changing psychological knowledge, so if you plan to use any of the films in your classroom it’s best to familiarise yourself with the content so you can update anything that needs clarification.

Three “new” films were added to the original collection – Applying Psychology in Life, Cognitive Neuroscience and Cultural Psychology – to reflect more-recent developments in psychology.

Each programme in the series focuses on a particular area of psychological research – The Self, Testing and Intelligence, Sex and Gender, Psychopathology and the like – and generally features a mix of psychological scientists, practitioners and theorists explaining their research and theoretical positions. Use is also made of classic archival footage featuring people like Watson and Pavlov.

Re-evaluating the SPE. And its Critics.

August 10, 2025

It’s probably fair to say that Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) has, particularly over the last few years, attracted a great deal of critical attention – something that should, on the face of things, make it relatively easy for students to evaluate.

The problem, however, is that while the SPE has thrown-up a number of well-known criticisms these don’t always seem to be presented in a way that’s been clearly thought-through in many contemporary psychology textbooks and websites. While students are presented with criticisms of the study, there’s no real attempt to evaluate them in the light of our changing understanding of the study – something this post is designed to correct.

The Critique…

In general students are encouraged to criticise the SPE in terms of three ideas:

the study is invalidated by demand characteristics.

its reliability has been called into question by its lack of replication, particularly in relation to Haslem and Reicher’s (2002) BBC Prison Study.

the study involved a number of highly-questionable ethical choices.

We can examine each of the above to, firstly, understand the basis of the criticism and, secondly, suggest a “critical response” students can make as a means of actually evaluating the SPE and the claims of its detractors.

Demand Characteristics

The most potentially damning criticism raised against the SPE is that Zimbardo and his collaborating colleagues weren’t simply dispassionately observing a situation play-out in real time. Rather, the argument here is that Zimbardo in particular was heavily-invested in ensuring that the outcome of the experiment matched his predictions about what would happen.

In basic terms, Zimbardo’s situational psychology argued that people are shaped by the environments in which they find themselves. Thus, if a group of perfectly ordinary, non-violent, college students are given positions of complete power and authority, where they are expected to keep order by whatever means necessary, they will adapt to the situation by behaving in ways that demonstrate that power.

In this respect, critics of the experiment argue that Zimbardo acted in ways – some subtle, some not – that biased the experiment and effectively created the outcomes he predicted. As has emerged, for example, from the Stanford Prison archive in films like Quiet Rage, Zimbardo was heavily-involved in directing the experiment – from designing the prison (including its punishment cell…) and intimidating uniforms to briefing the Guards about their role and the importance of maintaining order. The fact Zimbardo took-on a dual role as both the lead researcher and the Superintendent in charge of overseeing everything that happened in the prison has also led to the accusation that this gave him the power, which he enthusiastically exercised, to determine the outcome of the experiment.

However…

While it’s clear demand characteristics played a part in the Stanford Prison Experiment, the question is whether or not this, in itself, is a sufficient criticism? The real evaluation here, perhaps, is the question of whether demand characteristics were an integral part of the experiment itself?

The argument here is that Zimbardo needed to embed clear demand cues into the experiment in order to enhance its ecological validity (an idea we’ll discuss further in a moment in relation to realism and replication). The important point here is that in order to test the brutalising effects of prison conditions on both guards and prisoners, Zimbardo had to create an initial environment, both physical in terms of the building and mental in terms of the guards’ orientation to their role, that at least partially reflected the real structure of American prisons.

In other words, for the experiment to work as designed it was absolutely necessary to create an environment that encouraged, in some small ways, the guards to develop authoritarian personalities. That, after all, was the point. To argue Zimbardo’s demand cues biased the experiment by compromising his objectivity isn’t sustained by the evidence: once Zimbardo set the parameters for the experiment – how the prison was set-up, the punishments available to the guards, how the guards should orientate themselves towards their role – it was allowed to play-out until things got out of hand…

The key point here is that in a real prison system the individual guard or prisoner is dropped into an already existing power structure they cannot control: they can either conform to its demands or oppose it and face the consequences. And since this is what the Stanford Prison Experiment tried to simulate, the demand characteristics introduced by Zimbardo, it could be argued, were an important and necessary part of the experiment.

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Hinge Questions

August 1, 2025

“Asking questions” is probably one of the most basic and ubiquitous classroom techniques teachers use to check student understanding and there’s a wealth of research to show that, done well, it’s an effective learning tool.

There’s also no shortage of advice about how to structure questions effectively, although, this being the Internet, if you were to take everything that’s proposed on board it would be less like finding ways to improve your classroom effectiveness and more like joining a cult.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I’m always suspicious of anyone who claims to have “a system” that’s guaranteed to achieve a particular outcome. I’m much more in favour of teachers looking at different ideas and judging which are likely to work most effectively in their particular classroom. Which, in my usual roundabout way, is how to introduce the idea of pivotal moments and hinge questions.

What?

A hinge question is one you use at particular points in a lesson to determine what happens next.

Do you need to review or, worst-case scenario, reteach what you’ve just taught because no-one actually seems to understand it? Or can you continue to the next part of the lesson safe in the knowledge that everyone has a perfect understanding of whatever it was you were teaching?

While things in the actuality will invariably be more-complex than this, the basic idea is that you can use a hinge question as a way of checking the extent to which students have understood something important at particular junctures in a lesson.

A hinge question, in this respect is a question asked simultaneously of the whole class. For the sake of clarity and brevity, it should always be multiple-choice and will ideally have four possible answers:

One answer is correct…
The remaining answers should represent common confusions or misrepresentations of the correct answer.

How the class proceeds hinges on the answers given by your students.

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What Method Would You Use?

July 25, 2025

We’re currently editing a new series of Psychology Research Methods films designed to introduce students to ideas like why we need research methods, the range of different methods available and, most importantly, how to apply our knowledge of methods to resolve different kinds of research problems.

As is usual in the editing process stuff that was originally scripted and filmed doesn’t always make the final cut, usually because it duplicates material we’ve already referenced, because it slows the film down or simply because stuff goes on for too long and we need to make it more manageable.

Although it’s unusual for us to cut a complete section out of a film, you sometimes find that something that promised to work on paper doesn’t actually fit very well with the completed film – and this simple research methods exercise is a case in point.

While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the premise – students are shown three simple “study skills” scenarios and asked to explain which method they would use to study them and why they would apply that particular method – it didn’t fit very neatly into the flow of the finished film.

So, it had to be cut.

Luckily for everyone involved I’ve decided to resurrect it as a standalone 90 second clip that’s suitable for both Psychology and Sociology students…

How To Be An Effective Teacher

July 10, 2025

There has been much (political) debate in recent years in both Britian and America about the difference teachers make to their students in terms of the narrow (but politically primary) measure of outcomes. To put it bluntly, what, if any, difference do teachers make to student test scores?

An AI-generated picture of an “effective teacher”. The reality is somewhat different…

Within this particular scenario and all-things-being-equal (which they never actually are) there’s a lot of evidence to show that some teachers are more successful than others in helping their students learn. There is, in this respect, a Teacher Effect to learning which, anecdotally, many of us will have experienced in terms of That Teacher who somehow inspired us to do well when all the others had written us off…

While anecdotal evidence is one thing, actually measuring a possible Teacher Effect is another: although there’s been no shortage of such studies, making sense of what they’re collectively saying is something well beyond the purview of most of us – so a recent meta-analysis of “40 studies conducted during the first two decades of the 21st Century” covering around 1.5 million secondary school students and nearly 7,000 teachers across 17 countries by

Lopez-Martín and colleagues(2023) provides a helpful way to both answer the initial question and identify the most (and, by extension, least) significant characteristics of effective teachers.

In this respect, Lopez-Martin calculated that, overall, teachers made around a 10% difference to their students’ academic performance. Although a relatively modest difference in the grand scheme of things, it’s large enough that an effective teacher can make the difference between a student who is underachieving and one who is not.

If you also add in the fact that the “moderate effect” they found would be a magnitude greater if less-successful teachers did the things that made their more successful counterparts effective, it’s not stretching things too far to suggest an effective teacher can both turn an underachieving student into one who is comfortably achieving their goals and an averagely-achieving student into one gaining top grades.

While this broad, ball-park, improvement figure is undoubtedly important, to understand why some teachers can be more-effective than others we need to understand the range of possible factors – and their respective effect sizes – that go into making more-effective teaching and learning.

While Lopez-Martin’s research identified 21 factors that impact on teaching we can, for the sake of brevity, outline a small sample of those factors that seem to have negligible effects on learning before moving-on to identify the key factors that have both moderate and large effect sizes.

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Ninja Learning: AI Created A Podcast Of Your Paper

July 1, 2025

Yes it did.

Entirely unbidden, I have to say.

And while I was at first a little wary of what might be revealed, I decided to embrace the madness and share what is a weirdly-trippy exercise in what, I’m not quite sure.

Although the Podcast relates to a book I wrote (it says so at the start), I’m not altogether certain how. It seems to jump from (wonderfully florid) references to the general structure of the book (this was back when I actually thought about how to structure stuff…) to comments that refer obliquely – and sadly literally – to a little joke about “digging a tunnel from my window to yours” I added in the preface: a quote from my then favourite band Arcade Fire.

The AI definitely discovered something in there that related to some sort of pioneering approach to Sociological education I was apparently endeavouring to forge. It’s just a shame that I didn’t realise it at the time.

Or since.

This probably tells us something about AI but it would take a sharper mind than mine to actually know what that might be.

Anyway. Overall, the AI review was incredibly positive and exciting about my work.

Which is nice.

As was the bit when it referred to the book as a form of “Ninja Learning” – where was AI when I needed it most when so many teachers ignored the book’s very existence?

Finally, I must admit, in all honesty, that although I didn’t actually understand what the review was saying about my work, I am grateful for it being able to see and understand various links in the narrative that never occurred to me at the time. It just goes to show how effortlessly I was pushing the boundaries without having much of a clue.

All that probably remains to be said is that if you’d like to dip your toes into the wild’n’wacky world of Ninja Learning™ you can now discover just what you missed…

And, if you’d like to hear the evidence in all its voice-synthesized glory for yourself…

The Social Animal

June 25, 2025

A broad overview of social psychology constructed around a small group of experiments loosely connected by Forced Conformity Theory – starting with a quick clip of an Asch test in progress. This is followed by an experiment led by Dr. Stanley Schachter that examines the reactions of a small group of students to a student plant who refuses to conform to their collective viewpoint about a (fictional) contentious issue.

This experiment took place in 1963, but if you’ve got even a passing familiarity with 21^st century reality TV shows you’ll recognise the underlying process at work as the non-conformist is systematically isolated and eventually excluded from the group…

The next segment focuses on Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance which we’ve covered elsewhere.

The final segemnt is introudced by Dr. Morton Deutsch and explores concepts of competition and cooperation based around an experiment to investigate the effect of threat on a bargaining process.

In the experiment two respondents are charged with going head-to-head in a competition to see who can make the most money – they can either co-operate to make modest profits or they can introduce a threat to try to force their competition to conform to their wishes…

A final fun fact here is that a ceretain Dr Philip Zimbardo played a part in helping design Festinger’s experiment…

Cognitive Dissonance Theory: An Experiment

June 23, 2025

Although Festinger’s (1957) concept of cognitive dissonance is well-known in both sociology and psychology, one of his original experiments to demonstrate the phenomenon, carried-out and filmed at Stanford University, is a rather neat way of showing how the concept works, in a couple of ways.

Firstly, it shows how cognitive dissonance involves a psychological tension or discomfort when someone holds two or more conflicting beliefs (or when, in this instance, actions contradict beliefs).

Secondly, in this particular section of the film (there may be more, but I haven’t found them…) Festinger himself explains why the subjects who accepted a $20 fee to lie (approximately $250 in today’s money) found it easier to rationalise their (self) deception as “just lying for the money” than those participants who were paid only $1 (and who had, therefore, to rationalise their behaviour by convincing themselves that a fundamentally boring experiment was actually enjoyable…).

If you want to know more about the experiment, this overview of Festinger and Carlsmith’s study should fill-in any gaps.

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Psychology Transition Work | 2

May 21, 2025

The belated follow-up to the best-selling Psychology Transition Materials arrives “better late than never” just-in-time to provide students with lots of lovely Summer Work to stop them wasting their time relaxing, watching “That Was Rude” TikTok movies or curating their “Doesn’t Know It Yet” Instagram feeds (as I’m reliably informed the Kids do nowadays when they’re not being strictly, for their own safety, supervised).

So, if you’re looking to pick-up a few off-the-shelf transition activities so you can enjoy the warm weather rather than expend time and energy jumping through hoops ~~to keep Senior Management happy~~ to constructively occupy your prospective students, this might be somewhere to start.

Harris Academy Greenwich: Create a poster that illustrates a range of Issues and Debates (Free Will and Determinism, Nature – Nurture…) using suggested online resources (mainly YouTube videos).

Wilberforce 6^th Form College: Getting students immediately up-to-speed, this Transition Work tastes precisely no prisoners with Literacy Task that requires students to “research the History of Psychology” and write 500 words on Psychoanalytic, Behaviourist, Social, Cognitive and Biological approaches. Once they’ve finished this there’s a Numeracy Task that involves interpreting a set of data and representing it in various mathematical ways (Bar chart, Pie chart etc.). To cap it all off, students have to choose one of four potential occupations (Clinical, Prison or Educational Psychologist, Teacher) and write 200 words on why this career would suit them.

Poole High School: This focuses on Year 12 – 13 and takes an interesting approach to Transition Work by focusing on the completion of a Revision Timetable that, I think, is designed to run for 5 weeks over the Summer (I could be wrong, but if I am I still think that’s a very good idea. You’re welcome). There’s also some suggested reading and a task involving answering three sets of Research Methods questions from previous exams. Be that as it may, it’s the structured revision material that’s most interesting and something other teachers could usefully steal. Which isn’t a phrase I find myself using very often.

Wallingford School: Three tasks of varying complexity, the first involves making posters about three classic Case Studies of individuals who suffered memory problems. The second is to conduct and document a highly-detailed Experiment “designed to test the basic concepts of long and short term memory” (and then some…). I can only think this task is an elaborate way of getting some students to self-select themselves out of Psychology, although I could, of course, be wrong. The final task (presupposing students ever finish the last one) involves finding and summarising “a piece of research you find interesting / surprising”.

King Edward 6^th Lichfield: This extensive Transition Pack includes a range of Suggested Reading (from Trainspotting to Gang Leader for A Day) and some suggestions about how students could summarise their reading, plus similar stuff for films, documentaries and talks. Next up are summaries of 4 highly-influential psychological studies (Milgram, Piliavin, Loftus, Bandura). These are worth “borrowing” and using as a template for how to present further studies to your students

To round things off there’s a short glossary to complete and a link to the Tutor2u “Transition to Psychology” course – a 12-step “3 – 6 hour” course that’s free to use: you just have to sign-up with an email address and you’re ready to roll.

The Deepings School: The focus here is squarely on research methods with a major task being to work out the Aims, Procedures, Findings and Conclusions of 10 (count ‘em) classic psychological studies “many of which are on YouTube”. Students also have to note at least one strength and one weakness of each study. Next up is a couple of case studies (Genie, Oxana Malaya) where students have to list findings and conclusions and make an assessment about why we can’t generalise the findings from these studies. There are also suggestions for additional work (such as take a FutureLearn online course…) for those who are truly dedicated, love sucking-up to teachers or who have precisely zero life outside work.

Worcester Sixth Form College: The main task here is similar to that of the Deeping School – summarising the Aims, Method, Results and Conclusions of 6 classic research studies. Related tasks include answering a few questions about aspects of research methodology (what is an independent variable…) and calculating different types of average. Next up is a “watch the video, answer the questions” exercise on ethics and the work is completed by some optional tasks – listening to a range of TED talks and completing OpenLearn and FutureLearn (although the former seems rather high level for students transitioning from GCSE to A-level and the latter involves courses on mental health…). To round things off there’s a list of “psychology-related” documentaries, articles and books students can “summarise in no more than 100 words…

Etonbury Academy: The first task involves learning the Cornell Note-taking method, which is an unusual, but welcome, way to get students thinking about they take notes. This is followed by a History of Psychology exercise that involves looking at an online timeline and answering a few (10 to be precise) simple questions. The remaining exercises are all very similar: take Cornell Notes from a couple of textbook pages and then answer questions based on the Notes.

Coome Wood 6th Form: This transition work involves students watching a series of 6 YouTube videos covering things like Introducing Psychology, Social Psychology and Behaviourism and answering a few questions based on their viewing.

Sociology Summer Transition Work

May 13, 2025

If you’re looking around for some inspiration for “Transition Work” you can set your prospective students over the coming summer months, look no further.

Or rather, start here and then I’ll suggest ways you can look further afield.

It seems like every couple of years I get around to thinking about those long, hot, summer holidays and how we can stop students wasting their time doing stuff like “having fun”, “chilling” or, worst of all, “relaxing”, while not actually doing any of the hard graft ourselves.

And that, of course, is when my mind turns towards finding examples of Summer Transition Work you can give to your students while basking in the approbation of Senior Management safe in the knowledge that no-one’s likely to discover that you just cribbed it all “from the Internet”.

It’s a win-win for everyone (except your students and those teachers who had to create it all in the first place. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten. Until it is).

So, without further fanfare, here’s what I’ve managed to find so far (and don’t forget that it might be worth flicking through the previous stuff I’ve posted if there’s nothing here that catches your eye).

Harris Academy Greenwich: Straight out of the gate is a set of exercises that seem to be based around concepts of class, family and education: students have to watch an episode of a BBC programme called Motherland and answer a few questions about the characters and their behaviour.

Wilberforce 6^th Form College: Students write 500 – 1000 words on the topic of “what they think needs changing most about this country and how they are going to change it”. Apparently this work counts towards a student’s “effort grade”, which is a new one on me.

The Deepings School: A mixed-bag of activities that involves things like making notes on a range of basic Introductory concepts (socialisation etc.) and then applying them to an understanding of “real life” situations (how are we socialised by our family, for example). There’s also a short “research task” that involves doing some simple background investigating of three classic sociological texts (Learning the Labour, Housework and The Making of a Moonie) and a video-based exercise around inequality.

Poole High School: On a slightly different tack, this is a short Handbook (5 pages with lots of lovely white space) that introduces students to the basics of the (AQA) A-level course. It does, however, include a slightly different take on Transition Work in that it asks students to look out for articles about various aspects of family life (domestic labour, violence, children and much, much, more) as a way of getting students involved in the work they will do on the course. It’s an interesting idea, but whether it works or not I’ve no idea. Worth s shot though.

Wallingford School: If the previous Transition tasks are a little bit “dip your toes into the sociological waters”, these Transition tasks have more of a “sink or swim” vibe (which is fine. Each to their own etc.). First-up there’s a 1000-word essay on a “Culture or sub-culture with which you’re familiar”. This is followed by an Identity task that seems to involve a great deal of personal research around TED talks, podcasts and BBC programming, although the task itself is very simple and straightforward. A final Media task is noted but then seems to have been omitted. So don’t spend time looking for it like I most definitely didn’t.

Kind Edward 6^th Lichfield: This Transition Pack from GCSE to A-level offers a number of tasks that range from the relatively simple (matching “social issues” to the areas students will be studying) to more time-consuming (and tangential) stuff like reading 1984 the novel, watching some YouTube clips about it and then noting some of the key ideas involved. Personally I’m not convinced it “prepares students for the course” but presumably it’s something the King Edward teachers have found works. Next up there’s a task involving watching some “post-apocalyptic thriller” trailers and writing a paragraph about “What these films suggest will happen to society in a post-apocalyptic world?”. Not sure how it prepares students for studying stuff like families or identities but there you go. Continuing the filmic, if not necessarily social breakdown, theme are suggested films and documentaries with “sociological themes”. A section of carrying our social research offers up a couple of examples and then asks students to briefly analyse a piece of research on Troubled Teens (the original hyperlink has changed). Again, it’s a bit of a left-field Task but who am I to question etc. As a final task students have to complete a 5-word glossary using both a definition and symbol (which is an interesting attempt at dual-coding but I must admit I was stumped for symbols for some of the words (“Theory”?).

Worcester 6^th Form College: This is quite an interesting mixed-bag of tasks: make simple notes about “What Is Sociology” after watching a short YouTube video, keep a journal of everything done in the first hour after waking up and comparing it with the routines of family members, write short definitions of some key concepts. There are also tasks that touch on concepts of class and gender – read an online article and answer a short question – and some suggested films / documentaries to watch.

Etonbury Academy: Whoever teaches Sociology at the Academy has decided to delegate the task of Introducing Sociology to a 3^rd Party – in this instance the Tutir2U website and its free “Introduction to AQA Sociology” online course. This, I have to say, is an awesome move by said unnamed teacher because it fulfils the requirement to bring students up-to-speed with the subject by delegating the task to someone else so you can enjoy your Summer holiday. Students have to enrol on the “2 – 4 hour course” but, as I’ve noted, this is free and all that’s required is to sign-up to the site. I haven’t personally tried the course (yet), but it’s something I definitely plan to do…

Coome Wood: A bit of a Curate’s Egg, this consists of tasks like defining 20 “introductory concepts”, briefly summarising 4 Sociological perspectives, creating Mind / Concept Maps around “What is Sociology” / various research methods and a short Education task based on identifying “inside school” and “outside school” factors affecting “white, working-class, boys’ educational failure” – which is, at one and the same time, both oddly specific and over-generalised.

Crime in England and Wales: 2025

May 7, 2025

The latest edition of Crime in England and Wales, hot off the National Statistics press, has arrived with a dull thud on our doorstep and because you’re all probably way-too-busy Tik-Toking (or whatever “the kids” do nowadays in lieu of revision) I thought I’d do my usual Chicken Nuggets review (just the most tasty bits in easy-to-swallow mouthfuls).

However, before we get down to the nitty gritty of the highlights it’s important to point-out that you’ve probably been taught there are basically two main sources of crime data for England and Wales:

1. Police Recorded Crime (sometimes called “Official Crime Statistics”) that you will have been told lack reliability. While it’s probably not a good sign that the Government’s own Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) have repeatedly warned, since 2014, that many police forces fail to accurately record crime in their locality, steps seem to have been taken to try to address this general problem. The OSR have, for example, recently noted “Police forces are recording crime more accurately now than in 2014”.

While reliability problems do persist, it’s not simply a case pf the police massaging the figures through a range of quaint techniques, such as coughing (getting an offender to admit to multiple similar crimes), cuffing (downgrading the seriousness of an offence so the perpetrator may be charged with something less serious) and skewing (pursuing crimes that are easier to solve at the expense of crimes, such as burglary, that are difficult to solve). Police forces frequently come under pressure to prioritise crimes that “the public” find important and this can result in crime statistics reflecting increased police activity rather than a real crime trend. It’s also important to note that police recorded data is far more likely to be reliable for high-harm, low-volume crimes such as murder – which, slightly-ironically, brings us to:

2. The Crime Survey of England and Wales (formally The British Crime Survey) which, you may well have been taught, have a much higher validity than their police counterparts. This has partly come about because the CSEW has historically focused on low-harm, high-volume crimes that are much less-likely to have been reported to the police (again, for a variety of reasons, such as a lack of faith in the police’s ability to solve the crime). Again, for reasons I’ve just noted, this isn’t necessarily the case. For some forms of crime, such as homicide or car theft, official crime statistics are perfectly valid: they measure what they claim to measure, albeit for different reasons. Dead bodies, for example, are notoriously difficult to hide (and I should know) while the fact all cars need to be insured gives people an incentive to report their theft.

As you might have suspected, there is a third measure that can be used: the aforementioned Crime in England and Wales that combines data from both of the above sources. One reason for this you might find useful is that while the CSEW tends to focus on crimes against households and those over the age of 16, Police Recorded Crime includes a much wider range of offences, including those against businesses and children. Combining the two forms of data, therefore, makes sense.

More importantly perhaps, combining domestic and officially reported crime, can increase data validity. CSEW data, for example, shows that fewer than 1-in-6 (around 15%) rape victims reported their victimisation to police.

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Beyond Zimbardo: The Stanford Prison Experiment

May 4, 2025

The Stanford Prison Experiment, arguably one of the most controversial experiments of the 20^th century, has polarised opinions for over 50 years:

To its supporters, the transformation of perfectly decent college students into brutal guards or compliant prisoners demonstrated the power of situations to determine behaviour.

To its detractors, the study is a perfect storm of unethical behaviours and outrageous researcher interventions that created what Le Texier concluded was “an incredibly flawed study”.

While acknowledging the importance of this debate, Professor Stephen Reicher argues that to truly understand the significance of the Experiment we need to go “Beyond Zimbardo” in a way that gives your students both a fresh insight into – and a more-critical perspective on – the underlying rationale of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

This short film gives students an insight into both the Experiment itself and the more-recent evidence from the Stanford Archive about how it was constructed and conducted.

More-importantly perhaps it builds on this evidence to argue that the researchers were not neutral observers but active participants in a complex experiment centred around social identities and the implications this interpretation has for our understanding of brutal behaviours.

Dynamic Learning: Mindmaps

April 28, 2025

The next in our popular Dynamic Learning series of Study Skills films is Mindmapping, a note-taking technique originally popularised by Tony Buzan in the 1970’s. Despite the huge number of dauntingly complicated and confusing examples splattered across the Internet, it’s a technique that’s actually simple to learn and apply once you understand four simple principles outlined in the film.

Mindmapping is what’s called a visual note-taking technique and if you’re accustomed to taking linear notes they might take a bit of getting used to. This is because Mindmaps let you combine text and images across a single page in a way that dual-codes information. When done correctly, research has shown this can significantly improve your ability to remember and recall information because linking verbal and visual information helps to encode it in memory.

While Mindmaps aren’t particularly great for taking notes in fast-moving situations like lectures, where you don’t always have the time to think carefully, they’re really useful when you do have time to reflect, such as taking notes from a textbook or putting your lecture notes in order.

This makes them ideal for things like brainstorming and problem-solving where the focus on a single topic and connecting key ideas helps you develop and evaluate your thoughts along different branches of the map. These are things that can help you in high-pressure situations like exams, where the ability to quickly generate ideas and solve the problems posed in exam questions will help you achieve your best possible grade.

Collections 6 | PowerPoint Presentations

April 24, 2025

The next set in the Collections series covers both Sociology and Psychology and covers a mix of PowerPoint Presentations, some of which I’ve lifted from the Web but a lot of which I’ve created.

These, as you might expect, are not your conventional “list of bullet-points on a white screen” Presentation and so may not be to everyone’s taste.

If, however, you’re after stuff that’s a little more exotic (and interactive) then some of these might just be worth exploring.

Sociology

Introductory

Investigating Sociology: If you’re looking for a new and radically different way to kickstart your Introduction to Sociology sessions, this is the Presentation for you. Otherwise, I’d just stick to a textbook and some bullet points.

Origins of Sociology: Introduce students to 9 of Sociology’s founders using an interesting Time Line effect that, believe me, took a very long time to perfect.

Core Concepts: Culture, Identity and Socialisation.

Theories of Self and Identity: A range of theories to evaluate.

Culture and Identity: Set of official OCR Presentations.

Global Culture: 3 Views: Outlining some of the key features of three different interpretations of the impact of globalised cultural forms.

Five Methods of Socialisation: Definitions of Selective exposure, Identification, Modelling, Sanctions (rewards and punishments) and Nurturance.

Agencies of Socialisation: Identifies and explains the role of a range of primary and secondary socialising agencies: family, peers, education, workplace, media and religion.

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Do Modern Audiences Shape Modern Media?

April 13, 2025

Or how a $19 Strawberry illustrates the changing world of media effects.

Okay, I’ve taken a bit of a liberty here because, outrageous as it undoubtedly is, the $19 Strawberry isn’t, of itself, indicative of how our understanding of the way the media affects our behaviour has changed over the past 25 years.

What’s actually the focus here is people’s beliefs about how a $19 Strawberry sold in a luxury outlet is supposed to look and taste – and, perhaps more importantly, how superior it is to an ordinary, store-bought, 30 cent Strawberry.

As the following clip from the Jimmy Kimmel Show demonstrates, when people believe a situation is real, it is real in its consequences (the Thomas Theorem). In this instance people were stopped in the street and asked if they would like to try a “$19 Strawberry” – something actually sold in Erewhon, a luxury grocery store in Los Angeles.

While each respondent believed they were sampling a luxury Strawberry, what they were actually tasting was a bog-standard 30-cent store-bought Strawberry…

What this clip demonstrates is how our understanding of the world is shaped by how we are encouraged to see that world and while this idea is by no means new (see, for example, Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory and Mean World Syndrome in particular) it does suggest a different way of looking at how the mass media affects an audience.

Or, if you prefer, how audiences affect the media.

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The New Penology

April 8, 2025

The New Penology refers to changes in the roles played by control agencies (both formal, such as the police and informal, such as schools) in contemporary societies that can be summarised in terms of three main ideas:

1. The Extension of control

This refers to the idea that social controls in the late 20^th century have been increasingly extended, both in terms of the number of people subjected to such controls and, not coincidentally perhaps, the kinds of behaviours that have been increasingly subjected to such controls. In this respect Cohen (1979) has suggested we need to think about three ways social controls have gradually been extended in modern societies:

Firstly in terms of blurring the boundaries between deviance and non-deviance, deviant and non-deviant, criminal and non-criminal. For Cohen, the 19^th century development of “segregated institutions of incarceration”, such as prisons and asylums had one virtue: they clearly defined the boundary between the deviant and non-deviant. Modern forms of penology blur these boundaries, through various programmes and treatments, to create a continuum of control that involves a range of preventative, diagnostic and screening initiatives, from ‘pre-delinquents’ (those who haven’t ‘as yet’ committed an offence) at one extreme, to high risk populations (persistent offenders) at the other.

In this respect the argument here is that modern penology has shifted the focus away from the simple punishment of objective offences to ideas about risk management and the control of “anti-social behaviours”.

Risk management, for example, represents part of what Feely and Simon (1992) have termed a “new discourse” around how control agencies are encouraged to view crime – one that replaces conventional ideas about moral or medical descriptions of the individual with an actuarial approach that involves “probabilistic calculations and statistical distributions applied to populations” (actuaries working for insurance companies, for example, mathematically calculate levels of risk, such as things like ‘early death’ probabilities for those buying life insurance). What has been called an “economic approach” to crime and social control involves things like:

• identifying and managing “unruly groups” with high probabilities of criminal involvement. On the punitive side this may involve the increased use of formal police resources, such as more-frequent patrols, while less-punitive interventions may be made through schools and social services.

• the development of “low-cost” / “cost-effective” forms of control such as electronic tagging.

• managingcriminal activity through risk assessments that identify possible situations and areas that require additional surveillance or police resources. This may involve processes such as “hotspot policing”, whereby more police resources are targeted at very specific public areas (such as clubs and pubs) that attract large number of young people.

• resource targeting is similar to the above but involves the idea of concentrating police resources in areas where “high probability offending groups” such as young, working-class men live, work and play.

• sentencing according to risk acknowledges the idea that incarceration in prisons doesn’t reform offenders, but when offenders are in prison they can’t commit further crimes. Rather than sentencing offenders for what they’ve done, therefore, sentencing should reflect the risk of reoffending; habitual offenders, for example, represent a high-risk category and should be given longer sentences than low-risk offenders.

One particularly notable example of this kind of sentencing was the introduction of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) in 2005. Under this policy an offender convicted of “a serious offence” and who was considered “dangerous” to the public could be kept in prison until they were “no-longer deemed a threat to the public”. Even though IPPs were abolished in 2012 “for all new offences”, those originally sentenced under the policy are still subject to it. As of 2024 there were still over 1,000 prisoners serving indeterminate sentences who are currently designated as too dangerous to release by the Parole Board.

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Collections 5 | Flipbooks

March 1, 2025

The next Collection in a series that includes Learning Mats, Revision Resources, Simulations and the ever-popular Introductory Sociology, brings together all the Flipbook posts dotted around the Blog I could find and puts them into one handy cut-out-and-keep post.

Research Methods

The first four to be given the Flipbook treatment are actual, physical, book chapters that I wrote back in the days when I was Quite Interested in writing textbooks.

The Research Process:

Quantitative Research Methods

Qualitative Research Methods

Mixed Methods

Overt Participant Observation illustrated by Venkatesh’s “Gang Leader for a Day”

Theory

Systems Theory: It’s Functionalism, Jim. But not as you know it.

Modernity and Sociological Theory

Postmodernity and Sociological Theory

Globalisation: Economic, political and cultural dimensions.

Global Culture: 3 views on the nature and extent of changing global culture.

Global Culture – Video Version: As above except this version uses video examples rather than static pictures.

Risk Society: It’s modernity, Jim. But not as you knew it.

Click for education, Crime, revision and Media

The Helpful Professor

February 25, 2025

The Helpful Professor site offers a range of free Study Guides for both Sociology (115 guides) and Psychology (30 guides) aimed at American University students doing Introductory courses in these subjects (Sociology 101, for example). The level at which they’re pitched, however, wouldn’t be out of place on an A-level Sociology or Psychology course.

Each Guide is based around a key concept or theory (from Anomie to Worldview, Attachment Theory to Sublimation…) and generally follows a standard format of providing a short definition, examples and brief criticisms. A few of the Guides also have accompanying animated video clips and while I’m not sure how many there are, the one’s I’ve seen are generally short, interesting and informative.

As you may have noticed, I didn’t qualify “examples” because, for whatever reason, these tend towards the excessive. Does any Sociology student, for example, really need:

23 examples of Achieved Status?
9 Agents of Socialisation?
16 instances of Cancel Culture?
13 examples of Charisma?

Now, while I don’t know (I can guess) why the Guides should be packed with so many examples it seems to me they’re a bit of a distraction for students to be faced with so much information when a couple of examples would suffice. The fact something like Social Capital has a far more manageable 4 examples shows they could do it if they really wanted to…

And if you think the Psychology Guides are any different, they’re not. Attribution Theory has 10 examples, plus 5 “case study examples” thrown in for good measure.

This isn’t to say the Guides aren’t useful. It’s just that you may have to wade through an awful lot of stuff you really don’t really need. Which is basically to say the Guides could probably have done with a bit of judicious editing.

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Situational Action Theory: Online Magazine

February 17, 2025

I thought that for the 1,000^th SCTV blog post I’d make an effort to do something a bit different. But then I came to my senses and thought “why break the habit of a lifetime?”, which is why this Milestone Post is just another of my GoTo favourites – the flipbook (although I’ve decided to call it an Online Magazine to see if potential readers can be tricked into thinking it’s something worth reading).

Probably not, but at this stage it’s something of a wait-and-see game.

While I’m starting to get the impression that the Flipbook Format is one that very few people other than myself have much of an interest in – even though you can Turn The Pages Like An Actual Magazine! – I like to give people the option of reading stuff in this format.

And in this particular instance the Stuff in question is a collection of the various Situational Action Theory posts I made around a year ago (I may be slow, but I get there eventually). Although you can read these in the original blog post, it’s not really the same as viewing a custom-made booklet filled with words and pictures whose pages You Can Turn Like A Real Magazine. Something I may have already mentioned, but which deserves saying again.

And if you’re still not convinced, there’s always the pdf version – all the words, pictures and coloured backgrounds but, sadly, without the facility to flip the page…

If you need any more encouragement to have a butcher’s at the Stuff, what makes Situational Actional Theory particularly interesting – and perhaps a little unusual – is that it’s a theory of criminal behaviour that has grown alongside and out of Wickstom and Trieber’s groundbreaking work on the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+). A longitudinal study that has been running for around 20 years, with the next phase due to begin in 2025.

PsychEd: Free Resources

January 26, 2025

A rather unprepossessing WordPress blog about A-level Psychology, run by someone called “Ed” (hence the title) and featuring 8 posts in 2 years isn’t the kind of thing I usually feature on the blog.

But I’ve made an exception because, much like the proverbial duck, while there may not be much happening on the surface (which isn’t to say the posts about things like essay-writing aren’t interesting or useful) there’s one heck of a lot of work going-on just under the surface.

And that work involves creating a load of free Psychology resources aimed predominantly at teachers using the Cambridge International Psychology Specification. These, in the main, involve ready-made PowerPoint “lessons” and one advantage of this format is that the materials are relatively easy to edit if you want to add or subtract stuff to your personal teaching taste.

While the materials themselves edge towards the far end of “basic” (pretty much your standard bullet-point list with pictures and video links) the fact that PsychEd has done a lot of the heavy lifting for you in terms of putting together a lesson should probably count for something.

Whether or not it does probably rests on how many of the materials you’re able to use. If you’re following CIE this means pretty much all of them. For other Boards, maybe not so much.

Click to Access the Resources

Flipbook: Testing the Marshmallow Test

January 24, 2025

For those who prefer their information in a more-colourful magazine-style format than bare-bones blog posts, I’ve put the two recent Marshmallow Test posts together in an online flipbook format that adds to the growing collection I’ve put together over the years.

A flipbook, if you haven’t come across the format before, is basically an online document where you turn the pages using a mouse click or motion. While that may not sound very exciting -probably because it isn’t actually very exciting unless you live a very sedentary, sheltered, existence – it mimics the way we read offline.

And this is significant because studies such as Mangen et al (2013) and Delgardo et al (2018) have shown that reading printed paper texts increases levels of student comprehension.

Now, the obvious question here is whether reading an online text that mimics a printed paper text has the same effect by fooling the brain into thinking it’s something that it’s not?

And the obvious answer is “who knows?”. But it’s an interesting idea that, I think we can all agree, should probably merit a lot more research funding.

However, leaving aside the ins-and-outs of academic research funding, as I’m afraid we must, online flipbooks have one main advantage over both their offline and online (pdf) cousins: namely the ability to show embedded video. In the case of the Marshmallow Test this is a big advantage because it allow students to see examples of something like the actual experiments.

The other advantages of the flipbook over the blog post format involve various technical bits-and-bobs such as the ability to annotate and print pages or view page thumbnails (granted, not the world’s greatest technical advantage but it does allow for quick searching).

Finally, when you’re encouraging your students to read a little more, anything that makes it a slightly more pleasant experience is probably something we should welcome.

Theories of Crime and Deviance

January 20, 2025

Three short(ish) films dredged-up from The Archive (I’m not exactly sure which Archive but it probably sounds more-authentic than “found on an old neglected hard drive”) that provide a good overview of the major theoretical strands in the history of sociological theorising about crime and deviance.

1. The Social Causes of Crime introduces students to the idea that crime and deviance is not simply an individualistic pursuit – it has clear social causes. With contributions from leading sociologists such as Stan Cohen the film traces these causes from the classical criminology of the 19th century focused on the nature of the crime, to the positivist analyses popularised in the mid-20th century that focused on the nature of the criminal. This was expressed not just in terms of a “defective individuality” (the medicalisation of crime and deviance) but also a “defective environment” – the idea that the social causes of crime and criminality could be found by understanding the social environments that encouraged either conformity or deviance.

2. The Social Construction of Crime: Labelling, Radical Criminology and Left Realism: The second film starts by looking at the development of Interactionist approaches to crime as a social construction. The focus here was less on explaining crime and deviance as either a component of the individual and / or their social environment and more on looking at how individuals and social groups create crime and deviance through their reactions to the behaviour of others. Deviance, in other words, was in the eye of the beholder.

Click For More….

The Marshmallow Effect | 2

January 14, 2025

The first part of this post provided some background to Mischel et al’s (1990) Marshmallow Test and started to question the idea it could be used to predict things like future academic performance.

This concluding post looks in more depth at exactly why this should be the case…

From A to B…

There are two significant problems with the claim that delayed gratification is a cause of both improved academic achievement (what we can term the “soft hypothesis” because it only makes a limited, but still significant, claim about the Test) and a wide range of adult life benefits such as better health, higher incomes and the like (the “hard hypothesis”).

The first is that delayed gratification itself can’t be a cause of something like academic improvement. There has to be a mechanism, such as “willpower” or self-control, through which delayed gratification is expressed. In other words, the claim here is something along the lines that children who have high levels of self-control are able to delay gratification in the Marshmallow Test. This, in turn, explains why these children become academically successful – presumably through things like showing greater determination to overcome problems or having the self-discipline to study rather than use their time in some other way.

As Michio Kaku, a strong advocate of the predictive powers of the Test, puts it:

“The ability to delay gratification is a key predictor of success because it reflects self-control, discipline, and the ability to plan for the future. These traits are crucial for academic achievement, as they help students stay focused, manage their time effectively, and persist through challenges.”

Assuming these traits really are “crucial for academic achievement” – something that ideally needs to be tested rather than (conveniently) assumed – a second problem involves showing how “self-control” directly connects to and determines improved academic ability. In other words, we don’t actually know if those students who delayed gratification and performed well academically did so because they developed greater self-discipline, determination, grit and so forth. Proponents of the Marshmallow test simply assume that they do.

Now you see it…

Leaving aside the argument that advocates of the Marshmallow Test are simply assuming relationships they should be proving, the general takeaway here is that will-power is a hugely-important trait that not only determines our chances of educational success, it also determines things like our future body-mass index (the extent to which we are under or over weight), general health, happiness and income. More importantly, will-power is not only something that can be set at a very young age, it is seemingly resistant to change, in the sense that once you have it, it remains with you throughout your life – which, although it seems improbable, is something we’ll let pass. There are more-significant problems with the Test – the first of which is does it actually measure what it claims to measure?

This is a slightly-odd question because when we normally consider the validity of something like an experiment we’re generally looking at the relationship between certain pre-defined variables.

For example, if we wanted to know how a plant (the dependent variable) is affected by changes in light (the independent variable) we need to define exactly what we mean by “a plant”. If we didn’t accurately define it we might accidentally measure the effect of light on something we mistake for “a plant”, such as television (not a great example, but you probably get the drift).

In other words we assume the variables themselves aren’t up for debate.

In the case of the Marshmallow Test, however, recent neuroscientific developments (that obviously weren’t available to the original researchers) have suggested that what the original researchers thought they were measuring may not have been what they were actually measuring.

And that presents a Very Big Problem.

We’ve known for quite some time that different parts of the brain serve different functions but it wasn’t until it became possible to scan the brain to see images of what was actually happening inside our heads in real time that we could see exactly which parts were active under what conditions.

The Marshmallow Effect | 1

January 13, 2025

Although the concepts of immediate and delayed gratification have been widely used in both psychology and sociology for over 50+ years, perhaps their most well-known application has been through Mischel’s “Marshmallow Test”. This experiment has seen its influence spread from the world of academic psychology to the wider shores of both the popular imagination and, more-interestingly perhaps, into many schools and colleges.

To understand why this has been the case – and to suggest why this should be a cause for concern – we need to look briefly at the test itself and a range of contemporary psychological and sociological critiques.

What Is It?

Although the ideas underpinning the Marshmallow Test have, in one shape or another, been around since at least the late 1950’s – Mischel’s (borderline racist – maybe to be charitable they were different times…) 1958 study of children in Trinidad arguably being one of the first – the test itself involves a young (4 years old in Mischel’s 1990 study) child being presented with a desired object (such as a marshmallow) and told the examiner will leave the room for 15 minutes. If the child can delay eating the marshmallow until the examiner returns they will be given a second marshmallow to eat.

As Mischel put it, the main objective of these studies was “to create a conflict for young children between the temptation to stop the delay and the desire to persist for the preferred outcome when the latter required delay”.

Although the 1958 study looked specifically at cultural influences in the behaviour of two distinct ethnic groups (the “presence or absence of the father within the home, age, and socioeconomic status”), later studies focused more on individual gender differences based around measured differences in “willpower” or self-control. The 1990 study, for example, tested “male and female preschoolers in the Bing School of Stanford University, a preschool for mostly middle-class children of faculty and students from the Stanford University community”.

Why Is It Important?

As a stand-alone piece of research the Marshmallow Test is interesting, but what catapulted it into the wider public consciousness was the follow-up studies Mishcel et al (1990) carried-out when their original respondents were 16 and 18. More-specifically they found their respondents SAT scores reflected their ability to delay gratification: in a nutshell, the 4 year old students who were able to delay their gratification had higher levels of academic achievement at age 16 than those who didn’t.

To cut a long story short, the relationship between self-control and academic achievement not only became an accepted part of the discourse – if you wanted to be successful, both academically and in later life, you needed to develop and exercise self-control from a young age – it also spawned a small sub-genre of self-help manuals designed to teach “willpower” and, more-worryingly perhaps, found its way into the curriculum of a significant number of American schools.

Toasted?

So, is the hype justified? Let’s approach this from a few different directions, starting with some general observations about the Tests.

Study Smarter: Giving Your Ideas Legs

January 7, 2025

Whether you’re a teacher looking to instil in your students the idea there are a wide range of scientifically-demonstrated techniques you can use to improve your performance in examinations or a student looking for a quick fix to improve your recall and presentation skills, there’s no-doubt “study skills” (or whatever you prefer to call them) are an integral part of the learning process.

And while the ability to master these skills – from better note-taking to improved memory and increased productivity – isn’t going to magically transform you into a Grade A student without you putting in the academic mileage (despite what you may have seen on YouTube or, possibly even worse, TikTok) there’s no-doubt that combining an understanding of how to study (metacognition) with a strong study ethic (you attend classes, do the reading, contribute your ideas to lessons…) is a winning formula.

But, as I’ve just indicated with the two film clips above, not all study skills “secrets” or “tricks” are created equal. While most of the stuff you see on social media is banal (“concentrate more!”), weird (“take a cold shower after studying to boost your adrenaline and memory”) or quite possibly both (“treat yourself like a dog!”) there are things you can do to improve your ability to study effectively.

There may be, for example, times when you’re faced with writing a particularly obtuse and seemingly intractable essay.

Or times when you’re trying to get to grips with an idea introduced previously in class.

It’s in these situations that you need a little creative boost to get things moving in the right direction and one simple thing you can do to provide it is, according to a study by Oppezzo and Daniel (2014), to take a hike.

Literally rather than figuratively.

In a series of four experiments the researchers tested how different types of walking – inside on a treadmill and outside in the open air – impacted on an individual’s creatively (using Guilford’s Alternate Uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking).

And what they found was that even under different experimental conditions, some form of walking exercise resulted in a measurable creativity boost for a large majority of the participants. As they put it:

“The effects of outdoor stimulation and walking were separable. Walking opens up the free flow

of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity”.

Walking, it seems, can be good for both the Mind and the Body.

A Top 10 of Psychological Myths

December 9, 2024

In which Ben Ambridge takes 15 minutes out of his very busy life (probably. I’m speculating. I don’t actually know. He might just have had nothing to do on a wet Tuesday) to both identify and – here’s the kicker – sadly disabuse your belief in any or indeed all of the following psychological phenomena:

Man are from Mars, Women are from Venus: How different are men and women actually? Well, it’s “not so much a case of Mars and Venus, more a case of Mars and Snickers”. I.e. not really very different at all.

Rorschach (Ink Blot) test: “No validity when it comes to diagnosing people’s personality…”. Although if you’re in two minds about whether or not to believe Ben you’re apparently in good company because if you do use the Ink Blot tests in such a way you’re likely to be over-diagnosing schizophrenia, for reasons that are well above my pay-grade and level of psychological maturity.

Learning Styles: If you need to think about whether you’re a visual, audio or kinaesthetic learner the Bad News is that “learning styles are made up”. If you think that’s a bit harsh, you’ll probably be disappointed to learn they also have “no scientific validity whatsoever”. And if you’re finding that a bit difficult to understand it’s not because I’ve presented the information in a Read / Write style that doesn’t match your visual-audio preference. It’s because you’re Quite Gullible (and probably desperate for some Magic Bullet technique that will turn your average students into world beaters).

Read On…

Experiments: The Asch Test

December 2, 2024

I always found teaching “the experimental method” in sociology a little dull because there were relatively few examples I could use to illustrate the genre.

And most of what were available seemed to be created by ~~psychopaths~~ psychologists.

It obviously didn’t help that a couple of the really good examples weren’t something that could be easily replicated in the classroom. There are also, apparently, “rules and regulations” covering exactly who you can and can’t keep locked up against their will – or put “in the hole” (a broom cupboard, as it was more-conventionally known) when they fail to follow simple instructions.

To which my “Who knew?” response didn’t seem to reassure “The Powers That Be”.

And once the Engineering Department rejected my entirely-reasonable request for a Shock Machine on the basis that I had been repeatedly warned about “introducing instruments of torture into the classroom” (it went against College Policy. Apparently) I was left with little or no option but to submit my students to an Asch Test.

Which I’m glad I did, because it turned-out to be fun for all involved. With the possible exception of the student victims.

If you’re not familiar with the background, I’ve scanned a copy of Solomon Asch’s short (only 4 pages!) “Opinion’s and Social Pressures” in which he describes the basic experiment and it’s variations. In simple terms a small group of respondents were asked to say which of three lines of varying height – one longer, one shorter and one the same length – were a match for a fourth line.

All but one of the respondents were in on the game in which, for the first couple of rounds, they would all answer correctly. For most subsequent rounds the first respondent would answer incorrectly and their confederates would match this answer. The “test”, of course, was whether the experimental subject (otherwise known as “The Victim”) would trust the evidence of their own eyes and go against the group decision.

Overall, Asch found that around one-third of the test subjects gave-in to the (incorrect) consensus even though most were perfectly well-aware the majority were in the wrong. As you’ll discover if you read the document I’ve taken so much time and trouble to find and distribute, under slightly different conditions – such as when there were two experimental subjects in the group – the results were radically different.

While the original Asch Tests were exploring the nature of conformity and social pressure, for my sociology students I used it to introduce and explain some of the basic mechanics of experimentation (dependent and independent variables, confounding variables and the like) in a way they could partly understand by experiencing the process. This was not, of course, always perfect.

When I ran the experiment I tended to have around 15 – 20 confederates in the classroom (which is way too many but I wanted to give everyone the chance to experience the test) and just one experimental subject. They were always the last person to return to class after a break. This allowed me to brief the confederates about how to respond to the test, select a test subject randomly and not feel too guilty about selecting one of my students for the deception. ~~They deserved it for daring to return late to class~~.

In the Good Olde Days of Not Having Computers in the Classroom (a slight exaggeration. I did have a single 386 machine I’d managed to blag from the Computing Suite when they were upgrading their stuff) I had to create the Test Cards out of cardboard and sticky-back plastic.

I didn’t strictly need the latter, but saw it as an ironic commentary on the state of education at the time. You can probably tell why I never made it out of the classroom and into the ranks of Senior Management. I’d have been happy with Junior Management, but alas it was Not To Be (I am of course joking. I would not have been happy with Junior Management).

I do recall laminating the cardboard under the (mistaken) belief I would need to use them more than a few times.

The reason I didn’t, despite the Test being something the students enjoyed, was that it just took too much time out of the teaching scheme. When I started teaching A-level Sociology we had around 6 hours of class contact time a week. By the time I ~~jacked it all in~~ moved on to explore my potential as an author and filmmaker, this had been cut to 4 hours a week – just not enough time to indulge in fanciful educational games. Or even “education”, as such. This, in a roundabout way, is why I’ve dug around for what’s probably the next best thing to being there: film of other people being there.

The first clip consists of a couple of two-minute examples of the Asch Test.

From the clothes and hairstyles the first looks like it’s from the 1970’s, the second a few decades later – the reason for including both being to show that even though generations change the need to conform stays fairly constant. If you’re a sociologist that’s something you might want to develop in relation to ideas like social structure and conformity, but it’s your choice.

The second, coming in at around 5 minutes, is perhaps more useful and interesting for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, it’s introduced by Philip Zimbardo, who explains the basis of the Asch Test. This may or may not be a good reason for watching, depending on your view of Philip Zimbardo.

The second is more compelling. The clip not only shows an example of the classic Asch Test, 5 confederates and 1 test subject, it also demonstrates some of the variations introduced by Asch. In particular it shows what happens when the test subject has a partner (Spoiler Alert: they feel much more comfortable going against “the consensus”).

As an added bonus we hear from the test subjects themselves – what they were feeling during the test and why they tended to go with the majority flow.

Play It Again, Sam*

November 30, 2024

Someone whose name escapes me once said:

“We do not remember days, we remember moments”.

And that’s the thing about memory. It doesn’t really work the way commonsense tells us it works.

It’s not a simple mechanical process whereby memories are stacked and stored in nice neat compartments, like boxes in a warehouse. Rather, it’s probably better to think about memory as a creative process: it’s not that we actively make-up memories, as such.

It’s more to acknowledge that memories are fallible.

And they can be easily influenced and manipulated – both by ourselves (we tend to recall events differently, depending on how we’re feeling at the time) and by others.

The bottom line, when you start to think about memory, is the extent to which it can be trusted and Daniel Reisberg is well-known for his work in this area, particularly how our memories are constructed and how they can intentionally and unintentionally mislead us.

If you want to introduce his ideas – or just stimulate an interest in memory in your students – this short interactive video (you can not only play along in class, it’s something you should encourage your students to do) is a good start.

And if you find this useful and interesting there’s a second activity you can use as the basis for getting your students thinking not just about memory in general but the concept of false memories in particular…

*If you use the first of these two films (or maybe it’s the second – I forget) the reason for this Casablanca misquote will become apparent.

It will be our little shared moment.

Differential Achievement: The Raw and the Cooked

November 24, 2024

“Gap in GCSE results between private and state schools widens at highest level”
New figures highlighting the results gap between different school types have sparked fresh concerns about education inequalities.
The Independent: August 2024

This newspaper headline is fairly indicative of how exam results in England and Wales are generally reported – the raw (unadjusted) numbers of exam grades showing a picture of successful private schools (teaching around 7% of GCSE students and 12% of sixth-form pupils) wildly out-performing their struggling state school counterparts.

The Independent goes on to add that “The figures have sparked fresh concerns among social mobility experts about inequalities in the education system and widening attainment gaps between rich and poor youngsters”.

And while these concerns about the impact of social and economic inequalities are both real and important, a new study by Anders et al (2024) suggests that the educational picture in England and Wales, as it relates to socio-economic class, is a little more nuanced than simply looking at raw IGCSE / GCSE results and drawing appropriate conclusions – whether these conclusions relate to ideas about innate / inherited intelligence, the effects of social and economic environments or some combination of the two..

Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study the researchers looked at “the relationship between GCSE performance and social factors like family income and parental occupation”. More-specifically, they looked at GCSE performance between private and state school students once these variables (proxy indicators of socio-economic class) were controlled.

What they found has interesting implications:

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Sociology: The Core Concepts Trilogy

November 21, 2024

Many of you will be familiar with the Cornetto Trilogy of films, the brilliant Shaun of the Dead, the equally-funny Hot Fuzz and that third one they brought-out because of some contract obligation.

Allegedly.

I could be wrong.

Anyways, far be it for me to compare this trilogy with that trilogy. There simply is no comparison so I’m not really sure why I mentioned it in the first place.

So. While the Cornetto Trilogy can be used to have a Fun Night In (again, not guaranteed) on a wet Friday night, these three films dating from around 2007 can be used to introduce students to three building blocks of contemporary Sociology.

Guarenteed.

The first looks at the concept of culture and covers ideas like:

Formal and informal rules
Norms
Values
Culture
Cultural diversity
Social construction
Cultural change
Globalisation
Global culture
Cultural homogeneity

socialisation and identity

BPS Teachers’ Toolkit

November 5, 2024

Not to be confused with the much older (but still useful) Psychology Teachers Toolkit, this particular Teachers’ Toolkit has more-official origins in the sense it’s a co-production between the British Psychological Society and the Association for the Teaching of Psychology. While both sets of resources are aimed pretty-squarely at A-level / AP Psychology students, the BPS Toolkit covers a much wider range of resources than the lesson-plan focus of the Psychology Teachers’ Toolkit.

And while the latter is no-longer being updated, the BPS Toolkit seems to be going from strength-to-strength in terms of the range and depth of the free resources it has to offer.

Getting down to the important stuff, the site has two sections, the first of which, Videos, is probably the least-interesting unless you really have a thing about watching 30 – 60 second clips of different types of psychologist – educational, forensic and the like – talking about their job. There’s also a link to the main BPS YouTube Channel that has a serendipitous (and then some) mix of films, the most-interesting to me being the half-a-dozen short (60 second) clips offering useful study skills advice. Other viewers might, of course, find some of the many other films fascinating.

(more…)

Introducing Sociology

October 31, 2024

What seems like half a lifetime (but was actually around 20 years) ago I posted a YouTube Trailer called What is Sociology that was part of a much longer 3-part film called Introducing Sociology. Since then the trailer’s garnered around 350,000 views and, as far as I can tell, the original film is no-longer available.

So, since I happen to have a copy of aforesaid film I thought it might be interesting to put it out there, as I’m told “The Kids” often say.

The other reason for posting the film is a comparative one in that it looks at and talks about Sociology at the turn of the Millenium, something that gives us an opportunity to consider social changes and continuities over the past quarter century, not just from within Sociology but also from without: such as the development of the Internet, mobile technology and the like.

If you want a point of comparison, it might be worth having a look at one of our later attempts to explain “What Sociology Is”.

While the first, major, part of the film is concerned with an outline of what sociology is – with a particular emphasis on changing ideas about culture and identity – the second part, Introducing Sociology as a Subject, adds what it calls “the Student Experience” into the historical mix. Broadly this section answers the question “what’s it like being a sociology student?” (albeit at the World-Famous London School of Economics – of which, in the interests of full disclosure, I am An Actual Allumnus. Student experiences at other, I hesitate to say “less-well-known”, institutes of learning may be slightly different).

Anyway, this section not only covers various aspects of what being a sociology student entails, it also has an interesting illustrative section based around the relatively new (2006-ish) phenomenon of the mobile phone, looking beyond its simple functionality and into the broader implications for surveillance and social control – something that, 20 years later, has expanded in ways it would be sociologically-useful to explore…

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Dynamic Learning: Procrastination

October 30, 2024

The latest in our Dynamic Learning series of films aimed at helping students improve how they study looks at something that most of us experience at one time or another: procrastination.

Or as it’s technically known, “Putting stuff off ‘til tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. Sometime, anyway. No, definitely. OMG is it really due in today?”.

Unlike a lot of the study skills stuff that’s out there, the Dynamic Learning series is specifically designed to help students take control of their learning. It’s not just a case of identifying a problem and telling you what you need to do to overcome it.

Rather, the aim is to show you how to overcome a problem – from how to take effective notes, through improving your ability to recall information to, in this particular instance, how to stop putting things off and getting them done.

The first film, Avoidance and Denial, helps students understand what psychologists call avoidance strategies – the techniques we use and stories we tell to convince ourselves that we don’t really have a problem.

And once we recognise we have a problem, the next step is to resolve it – and instead of simply telling you what you should be doing (set yourself goals, work on self-discipline, use time management …) Prevention Strategies suggests three possible techniques that show you how to overcome the problem of procrastination.

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