Lower Class Students Research Articles

Bullying in Portuguese Schools

A modified version of the Olweus school bullying questionnaire was administered to a sample of 4092 pupils, mainly aged 10–12, in ten middle schools, six in the north (Braga) and four in the south of Portugal (Lisbon). We present and discuss the results of this survey on the following topics: frequencies of being bullied and bullying others; types of bullying; places where bullying occurs and children’s opinions about the playground. These variables were analysed in terms of factors such as school grades, under-achievement, social class, gender and school location (north or south of the country). Logistic regression was used to identify risk factors for bullying behaviour. For being bullied, an increased risk was found for male and low social class students. After multivariable adjustment, factors remaining significantly associated with bullying others were gender, school grade, social class and years of under-achievement. The results are compared to the results of other studies in Norway, UK, Italy and Ireland.

Education policy and equality in France: the socialist years

This article analyses the design of French Socialist egalitarian education policy, defined in terms of a number of indicators: organizational aspects of the education system, financial aspects of education policy and the size of the education system. It considers the extent to which the Socialists altered the institutional structure of the education system in order to create opportunities for lower class pupils or students to study. The performance of the Socialist government suggests that the institutional structures of education tend toward a high degree of continuity and are difficult to change in a short period of time. Nevertheless, despite this pattern of continuity, the Socialists did reform the education system in a way that seems slightly more egalitarian. The article does not attempt to provide a comprehensive explanation of this continuity, but points out some of the factors that account for continuities in certain elements of education policy related to the aim of equality.

Postcolonialism and the Idea of a Writing Center

The terms “remediation” and “Basic Writing” emerged at critical moments in the history of American higher education. Used originally to describe students who suffered from neurological problems, “remediation” became a popular designation in education journals in the 1920s in response to an ever-increasing number of under-prepared lower class and immigrant students who began to enter the educational system at the turn of the century (Rose 343, 349). These students’ reading and writing “disabilities” needed “remediation” before the students were prepared to enter the academic community. Similarly, “Basic Writing” instruction matured as a field in the 1970s, the era of the G.I. Bill and the open admissions policy at CUNY. Open admissions prepared the way for thousands of non-traditional students “whose difficulties with the written language [Mina Shaughnessy tells us] seemed of a different order . . . as if they had come, you might say, from a different country” (2). These students, Shaughnessy explains, were indeed “strangers in academia, unacquainted with the rules and rituals of college life” (3). These racial and rural “strangers” whose “other” languages and dialects posed problems so great as to appear, in the words of their teachers, “irremediable” Hunzer, Kathleen M. “Misperceptions of Gender in the Writing Center: Stereotyping and the Facilitative Tutor.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 22.2 (1997): 6-10.

Lancasterian Schools, Republican Citizenship, and the Spatial Imagination in Early Nineteenth-Century America

Joseph Lancaster9s educational methods, developed in England in the 1790s, were adopted in the public schools of most of the largest cities in the United States in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Lancasterianism demanded a very specific spatial setting: an enormous classroom in which hundreds of children were taught under the supervision of a single master. Children were broken into small classes to recite their lessons under the tutelage of a more advanced student, or monitor. Lancasterianism appealed to educational leaders of the new nation because it was cheap to implement and its orderly discipline promised relief from the social disorder of the new nation. Most important, the Lancasterian method seemed to offer a solution to a key theoretical problem in the formation of a republican polity: how to devise mechanisms for maintaining order within a free society. For those attuned to materialist social assumptions, Lancasterian schools seemed to offer a vision of republican citizenship and a spatialized method for shaping it. The lower-class students for whom Lancasterianism was intended and their parents rejected the method for its repressive and undemocratic intentions, while the method9s ineffectiveness and logistical contradictions led to its abandonment by American school boards by the 1850s.

The Effects of Summer Vacation on Achievement Test Scores: A Narrative and Meta-Analytic Review

A review of 39 studies indicated that achievement test scores decline over summer vacation. The results of the 13 most recent studies were combined using meta-analytic procedures. The meta-analysis indicated that the summer loss equaled about one month on a grade-level equivalent scale, or one tenth of a standard deviation relative to spring test scores. The effect of summer break was more detrimental for math than for reading and most detrimental for math computation and spelling. Also, middle-class students appeared to gain on grade-level equivalent reading recognition tests over summer while lower-class students lost on them. There were no moderating effects for student gender or race, but the negative effect of summer did increase with increases in students’ grade levels. Suggested explanations for the findings include the differential availability of opportunities to practice different academic material over summer (with reading practice more available than math practice) and differences in the material’s susceptibility to memory decay (with fact- and procedure-based knowledge more easily forgotten than conceptual knowledge). The income differences also may be related to differences in opportunities to practice and learn. The results are examined for implications concerning summer school programs and proposals concerning school calendar changes

The Effects of Summer Vacation on Achievement Test Scores: A Narrative and Meta-Analytic Review

A review of 39 studies indicated that achievement test scores decline over summer vacation. The results of the 13 most recent studies were combined using meta-analytic procedures. The meta-analysis indicated that the summer loss equaled about one month on a grade-level equivalent scale, or one tenth of a standard deviation relative to spring test scores. The effect of summer break was more detrimental for math than for reading and most detrimental for math computation and spelling. Also, middle-class students appeared to gain on grade-level equivalent reading recognition tests over summer while lower-class students lost on them. There were no moderating effects for student gender or race, but the negative effect of summer did increase with increases in students’ grade levels. Suggested explanations for the findings include the differential availability of opportunities to practice different academic material over summer (with reading practice more available than math practice) and differences in the material’s susceptibility to memory decay (with fact- and procedure-based knowledge more easily forgotten than conceptual knowledge). The income differences also may be related to differences in opportunities to practice and learn. The results are examined for implications concerning summer school programs and proposals concerning school calendar changes

English and Chinese in Hong Kong: pre‐1997 language attitudes

ABSTRACT: This study assesses the attitudes towards English and Chinese existing among secondary students in Hong Kong at the present time, with a view towards the imminent change in government which will take place in 1997. Using the same survey instrument as employed in an earlier study (Pierson et al., 1980), the authors surveyed 285 students in lower and upper secondary classes at selected public schools throughout the territory. The results indicate a strong motivation to learn English and tolerance towards the use of English in Hong Kong. As contrasted with the earlier study, secondary students in the present investigation did not associate the use of English with implicit threats to their Chinese identity, nor did they feel that it should be abandoned as a medium of instruction. These differences in response pattern may be due to methodological differences in the two surveys, or they may represent a change in language attitudes related to the changes which have taken place in Hong Kong over the last decade in anticipation of the takeover of the British territory by the Chinese government.

Language in the classroom: Literacy and collaborative talk

Abstract In this paper, I argue that simply to increase the amount of talk in the classroom will not necessarily lead to improved learning opportunities, unless serious attention is given to the purposes it serves and the types of interaction to which it contributes. This is particularly so for lower class and ethnolinguistic minority students, who are often believed to be in need of additional and remedial oral experience in the language of the classroom. In thinking about the place of talk in the classroom, we should be concerned to involve all students, whatever their background, in collaborative talk about tasks that are student‐owned and inquiry‐oriented and which integrate talking with thinking, doing, reading and writing in order to engage with topics and texts that both students and teachers find meaningful and significant.

Israeli Students' Perspectives Concerning Determinants of Intelligence

Abstract Students' attitudes toward the nature versus nurture controversy pertaining to a variety of critical phenomena in the intelligence domain were assessed. A student inventory was constructed, pretested, and group administered to 269 students in various academic institutions in northern Israel, and comparisons were made between various sex, social, and ethnic groups. The majority of the students maintained that environment is the main factor influencing both personality and intelligence. Environment and an Environment x Heredity interaction were the most popular categories used to explain various generalizations about differences in ability, particularly among lower-class students. Students of Western origin were more inclined to adopt an environmental perspective on differences in IQ than were their Eastern counterparts. No sex differences were observed.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

The primary aim of this study was to compare the attitudes and affective dispositions of middle-class versus lower-class Israeli elementaryschool students towards the psychometric examiner. In addition, the commonly held assumption about the meaningful relationship between attitudes towards the examiner and level of attainment in the ability test was put to an empirical test. A student feedback inventory, specifically designed to gauge the affctive reactions of students towards the examiner, was administered to 125 middle-class and 101 lower-class students following standardized group ability-test administration procedures. On the whole, the data show few meaningful social-group differences in attitudes towards the examiner. Also, the correlations between group ability-test scores and examiner attitudes, for both middle and lower-class students, were largely negligible. Thus the data negate the situational bias contention, claiming that the poor performance of disadvantaged students on ability tests may be partially attributed to negative dispositions towards the examiner, which adversely affect their level of test performance. Also, the data suggest that school psychologists in Israel, who spend a good deal of their professional time in administering, scoring and assessing the results of group ability tests, may continue to do so without fear that lower-class students' negativistic attitudes towards the examiner may be systematically debilitating their level of test performance.

Study of the factors influencing sex differences in the career motivation of Iranian high school students

The purpose of the study was to investigate some factors thought to influence sex differences in the Career Motivation of Iranian high school students. Subjects (n = 206) were balanced on sex, ages 17–18 and attending schools in Tehran, Iran. Measures included the criterion career motivation and six predictors: Sex, Social Class, Early Family Socialization, Religious Orientation, Community Resources and Community Discrimination against women 's careers. Multivariate regression analyses with partial correlations were used to test hypotheses. Hypotheses were that males would score higher than females on career motivation; upper middle class students would score higher than lower middle class students on career motivation; Scores on Early Family Socialization, Community Resources and Religious Orientation would be positively correlated with Career Motivation; and Community Discrimination would be negatively correlated with Career Motivation. Interactions were expected for Sex, Religious Orientation and Social Class. Main effects found in the regression analyses supported hypotheses related to Sex, Social Class, Community Discrimination and Early Family Socialization. It remained for the interpretation of three significant interaction effects to shed light on the contribution of Religious Orientation to Career Motivation. The three significant interactions found were Sex × Social Class; Sex × Religious Orientation; and Religious Orientation × Community Discrimination. It appeared that the religion measure was confounded by the new movement within Islam led by the Mojahedin Khalgh group that is supportive of women 's careers, in contrast to the dominant Shia Islam group. The Community Resources measure was significantly (p<.05) and positively related to career motivation but it did not contribute importantly to the prediction equation. The equation derived including interaction terms accounted for 41% of the variance. It was concluded that the analysis used provided an important addition to understanding complex phenomena such as career motivation in a changing social context.

Note on the Reliability and Scoring of the Chapin Social Insight Test

The Chapin Social Insight Test ( 1) was developed to measure a person's ability to recognize the psychodynamics in a particular situation and to resolve problematic situations. Although this test has been available for many years, the only assessments of its properties are those reported by Gough (2, 3). The present study was undertaken to update the information on the reliability of the Chapin cest and to assess two methods of scoring. Students in lower level psychology classes were the subjects. There were 53 males and 112 females. The subjects' ages ranged from 18 to 67 yr. (M = 23.32 yr., SD = 7.61). The Insight test was administered individually to 30 males and 65 females and to two groups of 23 males and 47 females who took the test during class periods. Insight scores were computed using the recommended item weights and by scoring the items dichotomously. Using the first procedure, scores ranged from 11 to 34 (M = 19.90, SD = 5.12). Using the dichotomous method, scores ranged from 7 to 21 (M = 11.87, SD = 2.86). Those who took the cest individually did not differ from those who took it in groups for both the recommended scoring (M = 19.80 and SD = 5.70 vs M = 20.04 and SD = 4.22) and the dichotomous scoring (M = 11.79 and SD = 3.11 vs M = 11.97 and SD = 2.48). Total scores by both procedures were highly correlated (s = 95, df = 163). The average item-total correlation for the weighted-scoring technique was .25, resulting in a reliability estimate of .62. For the dichotomous method, the average item-total correlation was .26 and the reliability estimate was .65. These are similar to the item-total correlations and reliabilities reported by Gough (3). The results of this study support the use of the Chapin Social Insight Test as an adequately reliable measure of the construct. However, since the dichotomous scoring procedure was as effective as the prescribed weighted-scoring method and the totals derived by each method were highly correlated, the use of the weighted scoring does not seem to be necessary (4).

Social class discrimination in the schooling process: Myth and reality

An earlier version was presented at the Annual Meeting of The American Educational Research Association, Boston, April 1980. A recurrent finding is that student's social class is related to school performance (EeUs et al., 1951 ; Heimann and Schenk, 1954; Deutsch, 1960; Coleman et aL, 1966; Fleishmann Report, 1972) and to educational attainment (Folger and Nam, 1967; Spady, 1967; SeweU, 1971, U_S. Bureau of the Census, 1973; Treiman and TerreU, 1975). A variety of causative factors have been suggested. This paper will explore only two: social class bias of school personnel and the relationship of the meritocratic ideology of the schools to the opportunity structure of the American society. Studies of teachers" classroom behavior and the assignment of students to ability and curriculum tracks will be reviewed in an attempt to demonstrate that social class discrimination in the schooling process is both myth and reality. It will be argued that the lower class student suffers at several key points in the schooling process, not because of criteria applied in a biased manner, but because of the nature of the criteria used to make decisions and the negative consequences that disproportionately affect lower class individuals when they are applied. These class-related criteria are discussed as affecting lower class students' opportunities during their school careers and as extending beyond the school to limit their opportunities for postsecondary education and their rewards in the labor market. Meritocratic criteria are then discussed in terms of their role in perpetuating, rather than reducing, educational and economic inequality.

Moral Reasoning of Students in Different Cultural, Social, and Educational Settings

Cross-cultural research on the development of moral reasoning was carried out using about 115 adolescent subjects representing urban middle-class and lower-class, kibbutz-born and Youth Aliyah (disadvantaged urban youth educated in the kibbutz), Moslem and Christian Arab groups in Israel. Kohlberg's moral dilemmas were used to determine levels of moral reasoning, and the data analysis was done in terms of his six moral stages. Analysis of variance was used to determine whether differences between groups were significant. The results indicate the following. (1) The level of moral reasoning of kibbutz-born youth was higher than that of the other groups studied. (2) Middle-class and Youth Aliyah samples showed higher level of moral reasoning than lower-class samples. Youth Aliyah students, whose origin was urban lower class, had a level of moral reasoning almost a full stage higher than the comparable lower-class students. (3) The Christian and Moslem Arab middle-class samples showed similar levels of moral ...

The Effect of Three Methods of Presentation and Socioeconomic Class on Recognition Performance in the Presentation of Low Frequency Words to Kindergarteners

A word recognition task was presented to 72 lower social class and 72 upper-middle social class kindergarteners who were randomly assigned to one of 3 methods (Word, Word Picture, or Word Object) and were asked to learn to recognize eight low frequency words. There were significant differences between lower and upper socioeconomic levels and among the three methods ( p &lt; .01). The Word Method was superior to the Word Picture and Word Object Methods ( p &lt; .05) for children from both lower and middle class schools and students from upper socioeconomic level schools scored higher than those from the lower socioeconomic schools ( p &lt; .01).

Motivation and Achievement in Black and White Junior College Students

Summary A number of motivational variables (need for achievement, educational aspiration, social science interest, self-concept of ability, test anxiety, and internal-external control) were correlated with grades obtained by males in an introductory social science course. There were no race or social class differences in level of motivation. The motivational variables highly correlate with achievement were as follows: for lower-class students, both black and white, social science interest; for middle-class black students, educational aspiration; and for middle-class white students, test anxiety. Middle-class black students tended to be overachievers; middle-class white students, underachievers. The findings indicate that generalizations about racial differences may not hold true for particular subgroups, and suggest interest in the subject as important in motivating lower-class students for academic achievement.

Influence of mode of presentation, ethnicity, and social class on teachers' evaluations of students.

Previous research has shown that both vocal and visual cues are utilized in stereotyping and that teachers' stereotypes of students' ethnic and social class backgrounds affect both their expectations and evaluations of them. This study offers evidence toward the following questions: (1) do teachers evaluate students differently according to mode of presentation, students' ethnicity, and social class? and (2) what is the relative influence of aural and visual,Ncues upon teachers' evaluations? Videotapes of Grade 5 and 6 Anglo,NI, and Chicano middle and lower class students were presenter to 156 teachers who rated the students on 15 semantic differential scales. A 3 x 3 x 2 analysis of variance for repeated measures revealed significant effects for all 15 scales. Anglos were rated most positively, followed by blacks; chicanos were rated least favorably. Middle class Anglos and blacks were rated more favorably then lower class Anglos and blacks, respectively; however, class made no difference in the ratings for Chicanos. The aural mode of presentation transmitted more cues than the visual mode. (Authors/RJ) FILMED FROM BEST AVAILABLE COPY U S DEPARTMENT OF 14EALTI4 EDUCATION WELFARE NATIONAL iNSTATE lc EDUCATION OCCumE...! NAS PEEN PE pA,0 DuCED EHACT,Y AS QECEvED TROv THE PERSON OH ORGAN24T.DN A TNG PO.NTS vF OH OP,N,ONS STAYED DO NOT NEC ESSARiLY HEPiaf LEN' OFT C1AL NATONA, ,457.,ulf Or E Duc AT ion, pips, T ON OH PO, ,Cv Presented_ to the Speech Communication Association Annual Convention, Lel, York, November, 1973. Program: Latest Developments in Interpersonal Communi...ation. THE INFLUENCE OF MEM OF PRESENTATION, ETHNICITY; AND SOCIAL CLASS TEACIEPSI EVALUATICHS OF sTuragrs

Effects of Health Instruction on Low and Middle Class Students

Effects of Health Instruction on Low and Middle Class Students

Class and Race in Humanities Teaching and Criticism

IF ANY ONE DOUBTS that we are living in changing, even revolutionary, times, then I suggest that he read the latest cure for the woes of Freshman English, that most universally taught college course in the United States. As expressed by Louis Kampf, next president of the Modern Language Association, the new cure-all is a socialist revolution.1 And a socialist revolution which will compel English teachers to stop preventing the rise of lower class students by dubious grading systems. But the winds of change are not only blowing in the colleges. Fredson Bowers, speaking of graduate education at the Brown University Commencement (June 1, 1970), though not so sure as Louis Kampf about the coming revolution, conceded that Involvement with life, not isolation in the pursuit of knowledge, is the current watchword.2

The Need for Research on Teaching the Disadvantaged

Attitudes (expectations and perceptions) and values affect behavior (Allport, 1958; Clark, 1965; Goff, 1954; Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968b), and what we read about the teachers of the disadvantaged seems overwhelmingly negative. The literature generally views the middle-class teacher in relation to lowerclass and disadvantaged children.2 The results seem to coincide: Becker (1952), Cohen (1955), Davis (1948), Friedenberg (1962), Havighurst, Bowman, Liddle, Matthews, and Pierce (1962), and Sexton (1964) refer to lower-class children, while Arnez (1966), Bettelheim (1965), Conant (1961), Hickerson (1966), Johnson (1964), and Riessman (1962) refer to the disadvantaged. These educators agree that the teachers' middleclass attitudes and values are in conflict with those of lower-class or disadvantaged students, and therefore are antithetical to