Welcome to the NepoVerse
If you’re having trouble explaining concepts like social and economic capital, Nepo Babies could help…
The A-level Gender Gap: A Visual Tool
Although I’ve posted before about the gender gap in subject choice, the focus has largely been on explanations for the gap in various broad subject strands (see, for example, Archer 2013). While this type of analysis is, of course, vital, what sometimes gets overlooked in the rush to explain is data that actually allows students […]
Q and A: Does the Gender of the Teacher Matter?
The Question A popular (as in “a lot of people seem to believe it“) and recurring question around the “failing boys” discourse in education across many western societies (from Britain to America and Australia) is whether a lack of male role models, particularly in early-years education, is to blame. The Answer Supplied by Carrington, Francis, […]
More Gaps to Mind…
If you’ve read the recent Mind the Gap blog post you might be thinking: “That’s all very well and good but what would be really useful is a Pdf version of the post that’s been designed in the style of the recent Sociology Shortcuts Magazine Issue 3 with all kinds of pictures and stuff or, […]
Mind the Gap: gender identity and educational achievement
Key Points Recommended for those with short attention spans or too little time to spend wading through a lot of informative but quite detailed stuff. Students. Probably. Yu, McLellan and Winter (2021): study based on sample of 597 students, aged 14 -16, drawn from 4 state-maintained secondary schools in England. Educational achievement is linked to […]
Education and Setting
It’s probably fair to say that most discussion of concepts like setting, streaming and banding in a-level sociology focus on things like the basic principles involved or the social and psychological consequences of different kinds of “ability grouping”. While this is, of course, a perfectly valid set of concerns (pun sort-of intended), there tends to […]
For A Few (A-Level Sociology) Organisers More
Every now and then – between creating short-but-beautifully-crafted films and resources that both push the a-level envelope and suggest interesting new ways of doing familiar things – I like to revisit old hits as a way of reassuring myself that, when it comes to creating interest and generating those sweet, sweet, Likes, you just can’t […]
Educational Achievement and Intelligence 2
The previous post in this two-part examination of the relationship between educational achievement and intelligence focused on the questions “what is intelligence?” and how can we define it? Keeping in mind definitions of both intelligence and achievement may be socially constructed, this post looks at three broad explanations for their relationship: positive, negative and agnostic. […]
Educational Achievement and Intelligence 1
To understand how intelligence relates to educational achievement it needs to be defined; we need, in other words, to know what intelligence is before we can examine how it can be measured and subsequently related to different levels of achievement. what is intelligence? Although on the face of things intelligence might appear relatively easy to […]
Pygmalion in the Classroom: Revisited
Whether you’re looking generally at Education and Methods in Context or specifically at teacher expectations as an “Inside School” factor in differential achievement, a useful study to have in your locker is Rosenthal and Jacobson’s “Pygmalion in the Classroom” (1965) experiment. Accessible examples of experiments are quite rare in sociology and “Pygmalion” can be cited […]