The influence of family background on teachers' ratings of children starting school

Abstract

A survey of teachers' ratings of classroom behaviour was conducted with respect to children who had recently commenced school. Three subscales of learning behaviour: Distractible, Apprehensive and Uncooperative (The Learning Behaviours Scale, LBS; Stott, McDermott, Green, & Francis, 1988) were employed, together with brief scales of teacher expectations of academic success and of their personal reactions to the children. Fathers' occupational status (SES) was found to be a significant predictor of learning behaviour on the three LBS scales and of teachers' expectations of later academic success, although the variance accounted for was only between 5 and 16% for boys, and was generally negligible for girls' learning behaviour. The effects of SES were found to be mainly evident in children considered “at risk” in various learning behaviours. For boys, this reflected a striking dichotomy between blue collar and white collar backgrounds, with teachers expecting the former group of boys to be four times more likely to make poor academic progress than other boys. Teachers' personal reactions to children were not found to be influenced by SES, but were linked to the display of inappropriate learning behaviour by boys. Teachers appeared highly sensitised to boys' behaviour, implying a negative “set”, whilst being correspondingly unconcerned about such behaviour in girls.