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 […]
New GCSE Sociology Knowledge Organisers
Following from a safe distance the recent batches of A-level Knowledge Organisers (A Few More A-level Sociology Knowledge Organisers and Even More Sociology A-Level Organisers) comes something similar for GCSE. These are largely for AQA but there are a couple of sets aimed specifically at WJEC/Eduqas. Chase Terrace Academy: Although I’ve previously posted Organisers for […]
Even More A-level Sociology Organisers
A little like the iconic red buses of yore, you wait a couple of years for a new batch of a-level sociology knowledge organisers and then two come along at once. Or a few days later at any rate. Bit like red buses when you come to think about it. Still, a gift horse is […]
A Few More Sociology Knowledge Organisers
I think it’s probably fair to say that Knowledge Organisers / Learning Tables have become a well-established part of the A-level Sociology curriculum these past few years and while I’ve only posted one new set of examples over the past couple of years (the aptly-named New Selection) plus a rather-brilliant variation on the theme that […]
GCSE Subject Choices: Class, Gender and Ethnicity
In an English context, most research into subject choice tends to focus on both post-compulsory education and gender for reasons that should be readily apparent: Firstly, post-16 (A-level) education tends to offer a wider and largely-unrestricted set of choices about which subjects to study, so student choice is much easier for researchers to identify and […]
Sociology Transition Materials
If you’re unfamiliar with the idea, Sociology transition materials are resources designed to help students transition from either GCSE to A-level or from A1 to A2. In the normal course of events they consist of notes, readings, activities and exercises that students complete during the long months of their summer holidays when they would otherwise […]
Gender and Subject Choice: Archer et al (2013)
The relationship between gender and subject choice in post-16 UK education is both persistent and well-known and has produced a range of explanations – some sociological, some not (Skelton et al (2007), for example, note the widespread belief ‘natural’ differences – babies are born with an inbuilt biological and / or genetic predilection – “push […]