Chapter 13 Education Chapter Learning Objectives Learning to Learn or Learning to Labor? Functions of Schooling
Describe the two main functions of schools. Define education, in sociological terms, as well as functional illiteracy(文盲), innumeracy(no計算能力), and human capital. Summarize the various ways schools can be used, and have been used, to socialize students. Explain the concept of schools as sorting machines and contingent arguments that schools reproduce societal inequalities.
Do Schools Matter?
Summarize what was learned about achievement differences among schools in the 1966 Coleman Report and explain why the results were surprising to many people. Describe the results of studies on the effect of class size on educational achievement. Explain the significance of findings about differences in educational achievement in public schools and private schools.
What’s Going on inside Schools?
Define the concept of tracking as used in education and explain its potential positive and negative effects. Explain why the classroom is one of the most socially intimate spaces in society. Define the Pygmalion effect and explain how it can be positive or negative. Define best practices and explain how they can affect teaching effectiveness. Explain how students can influence one another’s performance in the classroom.
Higher Education
Describe how functionalists and conflict theorists explain the educational boom in the United States over the past one hundred years. Define credentialism and explain how it has affected the job market. Describe the arguments surrounding the merits of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Define affirmative action and understand arguments made by critics of affirmative action as well as rebuttals to those arguments.
Inequalities in Schooling
Describe how class, race, and ethnicity affect educational outcomes. Define cultural capital and explain its influence on student performance.
Describe reasons other than class differences that researchers have put forward to explain the black–white achievement gap. Describe current research on the boy–girl achievement gap and the relationship between men’s and women’s education levels and their earning power. Explain how family size, spacing between siblings, gender, and birth order can affect educational outcomes. Describe some of the limitations of an intelligence quotient (IQ) test.
Chapter 13 Education Chapter Study Outline Learning to Learn or Learning to Labor? Functions of Schooling
The two main functions of schools are to educate students and to socialize them. Schools teach general skills, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as specific skills needed for the workplace. Human capital is the knowledge and skills that make someone more productive and bankable. Schools transmit values, beliefs, and attitudes that are important to society. This hidden curriculum(學校的全部課程) serves to form a more cohesive (有結合力的)society but has also been used to impose the values of a dominant culture on outsiders or minorities. Schools have been described as sorting machines that place students into programs and groups according to their skills, interests, and talents. Critics argue that this sorting process is not based solely on merit and that ultimately it serves to reproduce social inequalities.
Do Schools Matter?
The 1966 Coleman Report showed that two primary factors—family background and peers—explained differences in achievement among schools, rather than differences in school resources as had been expected. Since the 1980s, it has been shown that smaller class sizes have a positive impact on student performance. Private school students perform better academically than their peers at public schools, in part due to academic and behavioral differences. But some scholars argue that most private school students would also do well at public schools, so the education they are receiving may not, in and of itself, be the explanation for their better academic performance.
What’s Going on inside Schools?
Tracking, a way of dividing students into different classes according to ability or future plans, is intended to tailor a student’s educational experience more directly to his or her particular goals. In practice, tracking has a number of negative effects and may be more beneficial for those who are already privileged享有特權的. It has been shown that teachers can influence student performance through the expectations they set and their choice of instructional methods, which may include best practices. Studies show that low-achieving students placed in a classroom with mostly highachieving students tend to improve rather than fall behind. In a similar vein, a class with
more problem students (in terms of behavior) tends to have more disciplinary problems overall and lower test scores. Higher Education
Functionalists have argued that the rise in education rates in the United States over the past one hundred years is a response to the demands of the marketplace, though there are many critics評論家of this theory. Conflict theorists claim that the educational boom in the United States is due to the expansion of the educational system and the general view held by Americans that education is a mark of elite status. Credentialism is an overemphasis on credentials, such as college degrees, for signaling social status or job qualifications. As more and more people meet the qualifications for certain types of jobs, employers upgrade the requirements in order to weed out more people. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) has been shown to accurately predict a student’s potential for college success. However, critics argue that there are other equally good predictors that don’t share the SAT’s downsides. Affirmative(肯定的)action, which refers to a set of policies that grant preferential (優先的)treatment to a number of particular subgroups within the population, has come under attack as constituting preferential treatment and taking opportunities away from more deserving students/candidates. However, research findings dispute these and other arguments.
Inequalities in Schooling
Socioeconomic class, race, and ethnicity are often intertwined (糾纏)and clearly affect educational outcomes. White, middle-class students consistently outperform minority and lower-income students. In addition to the advantages that money can buy for a middle-class student (tutoring, test prep courses, access to private schools or better public school districts), such students tend to come from families with more cultural capital, which can include greater parental involvement, more informal educational opportunities outside of school, and more confidence in dealing with school bureaucracies. Much of the black–white achievement gap can be attributed to class. However, some elements that cause other theories to endure include the inversion(反向)of dominant values, the internalization of negative stereotypes, and even arguments about intelligence being genetic. In the past 30 years, girls have caught up with, and even surpassed(勝過), boys in many measures of academic performance to such a degree that some scholars talk of a ―boy crisis.‖ However, on average women still earn less than men with the same educational level. Studies show that family size, spacing between siblings, gender, and birth order can affect educational outcomes.
Although IQ tests have been updated to be more fair and accurate, they still only measure one kind of intelligence, they still face concerns about being culturally biased, and they still can’t truly measure innate(天生的)intelligence. Keywords: 1. Education - The process through which the academic, social, cultural ideas and tools, both general and specific, are developed. 2. Hidden curriculum - The nonacademic socialization and training that take place in the schooling system 3. Social capital - Any relationship between people that can facilitate the actions of others 4. Tracking - The way of dividing students into different classes by ability or future plan 5. Credentialism (文憑主義) - An overemphasis on credentials (e.g., college degrees) for signaling social status or qualifications for a job.
6. Affirmative action - A set of policies that grant preferential treatment to a number of a particular subgroups within the population —typically, women and historically disadvantaged racial minorities.
7. Social class - An individual position of a stratified social order 8. Cultural capital(文化資本) - Symbolic and interactional resources that people use to their advantage in various situation 9. Stereotype threat - When members of a stereotype group are placed in a situation where they fear that they may confirm those stereotype 10. Resource dilution model - Hypothesis stating that parental resources are finite and that each additional child dilute them