AQA AS Sociology- Education

Gender and Subject choice:

Girls External factors:

• Feminism: Women's rights and higher expectations than the tradtional role.
• Family: increase in single parent families = role model and increase in divorce = can't rely on men.
• Employment: increase in service sector jobs = greater incentive.
• Ambitions: Sharpe: found ambitions have changed from marriage to careers.

Internal Factors:

• Polices: monitoring for gender sterotyping and GIST- get girls into science and technology.
• Role Models: more women teachers and head teachers = positive role models.
• GCSE and Coursework: Mitsos and Browne- Girls do better in coursework because they are more organised. Girls do better in oral exams because they have more developed language skills.
• Teacher attention: French- attention for acedemic reasons are the same for boys and girls. Francis- Boys get negative attention and are diciplined more harshly. Girls get positive attention which increases self esteem.
• Stereotypes: Wiener- teachers challenge gender stereotypes. Slee- boys are less attractive to schools as they are 4x more likely to be exspelled.

Boys:

• Literacy: Girls more likely to read outside of school = developed langauge skills and advantage.
• Globalisation of job market: decline in manual jobs = no incentive.
• Feminism: Schools celebrate girl's qualities. Sewell- exams should be replaced by outdoor adventure.
• School teachers: lack of male role models- 2013 only 24% of teachers were men.
• Laddish subcultures: Francis- boys hear they will fail = Self-fulling Prophecy (SFP) and lads are influenced by masculine subcultures = anti-school.
• Policies: national literacy strategy, recruitment campaign and Playing for Success.

Subject Choice:

• Early Socialisation: Norman- children treated and dressed differently depending on gender. Boys and girls have differnt reading interests- Girls read about people = interest in English and boys read information texts = interest in Science.
• Gender domains: Browne- belief in domains based on expectations and experiences of adults. Murphy- asked children to write an estate agents advert, boys concentrated on the garage (male domain) and girls concentrated on the kitchen and interior (female domain.)
• Subject images: Kelly: Science teacher more likely to be male and boys dominate in labs makes science a male subject. Colley- ICT is a male subject as it involves working with machines.
• Peer Pressure: Paetcher: girls who play sports must deal with negative stereotypes = affects subject/activitie choice.

Ethnic Differences:

Highest achievement = Chinese and Indian. Lowest = Afro-caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi.

External: 

• Cultural deprivation:
• Linguistic Skills: Bereiter- African American's language = inadequate. Gillborn- Indian students do well despite English not being their first language.
• Attitudes: Lack of motivation, fatalistic attitude and a ethnocentric curriculum = failure. However ethnic minorities outperform whites.
• Family: Pryce- Asians are resistant to racism but Afro-Caribbeans aren't = low esteem and failure. Lupton- Asian family structure similar to school but white families aren't. Archer- Chinese families talk about the future = motivation.
• Evaluation: Driver- ignores positive affects of ethnicity e.g. black matrifocal families. Keddie- its victim blaming, the curriculum should be blamed.
• Material deprivation: 2004- Pakistani and Bangladeshi families 3x more likely to be in the poorest 1/5. Afro…