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 […]

Gender and Educational Achievement

A month or so ago I posted a 2004 resource (Gender in Education 3 – 19: A Fresh Approach) in which a range of well-known UK Education writers looked at different aspects and dimensions of gendered education and I thought it might be useful to follow this up with a slightly-later Report by Skelton, Francis […]

Aspiring to Succeed? Education and the New Right

One of the key features of New Right approaches to explaining social class differences in educational achievement is the attempt to frame the debate in terms of the qualities possessed by individual actors. This reductionist approach – reducing complex social processes to their apparently simplest and most basic forms – sees success or failure (as […]

School Climate: Narrowing the Gender Gap?

In a UK context, the relationship between gender and educational achievement – whereby girls consistently outperform boys at all levels of the education system – is both well-known and persistent. More-interestingly, perhaps, this situation is not, as Legewie and DiPrete (2012) note, confined to the UK, given that “boys generally underperform relative to girls in […]

GCSE Sociology Guides: Family and Education

GCSE Sociology resources tend to be a little thin on the ground, so it’s always nice to come across decent teacher-created material such as these two bang-up-to-the-moment Revision Guides created by Kate Henney. The Family Guide is a 25-page document that packs in a whole range of resources covering family types, diversity, alternatives, perspectives, roles […]

Education PowerPoints: Part 2

Part 2 of the Education Presentations gives you more of the same, only less of it. More PowerPoints, in other words, but fewer of them than in Part 1. Most of these are fairly straightforward “Teaching Presentations” but some contain YouTube videos (again, I’ve converted the links so they will play directly inside the Presentation) […]

Education PowerPoints: Part 1

Alongside the Revision Guides I seem to have collected a large number of Education PowerPoints that, while not explicitly geared towards revision, could be used in this way. Alternatively, they could just be used as part of your normal classroom teaching. The Presentations are by a mix of authors (where known) but the majority are […]

Leave Nothing to Chance: An Education Simulation

“Leave Nothing to Chance” is, unless I’m very much mistaken (and I probably am), my first real attempt at a “proper classroom simulation”. I’d like to say I’m excited about it, but when all’s-said-and-done it’s only a simple simulation. On the other hand, I very much hope you like it, use it, develop it and […]

School Climate: A different dimension to differential educational achievement?

The relationship between social class – or socio-economic status (SES) if you prefer – and differential educational achievement is well-known at A-level and students are expected to discuss and evaluate a range of possible factors / explanations for this relationship; these are usually grouped, largely for theoretical convenience, into “outside school” and “inside school” factors, […]

Sociological Detectives: Evidence Summary Sheet

To complement the Theory Summary sheet you can combine it with the Evidence Summary sheet that performs a similar function within the Sociological Detectives sim. In this respect it provides: A basic structure for students to follow when making notes about the different kinds of evidence they can use to support or question theoretical explanations […]