Boys underachievement in Education

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Alice Tripp          Sociology Coursework

Hypothesis/Aim

My hypothesis is ‘Boys underachieve in education due to laddish behaviour’. This subject is important for me as I see ‘laddish’ behaviour in most of my days at sixth form. Its also important as no one knows why boys underachieve so doing this study will help me understand why they do. Another reason for me choosing this area of study is because there is great concern over boy’s achievement which show sit is an important area to indentify the reasons for why this is happening in education. Wastage of talents is a big concern for schools currently as so many boys are talented but are scared to do well in case they don’t seem ‘cool’.

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Context and Concepts

My first concept is ‘achievement’; this is to succeed in doing or producing something. This is relevant to my hypothesis because I’m trying to find out by boys achievement is low.

   

My second concept is ‘laddish behaviour’. This is because I feel this is the reason for boys underachieving as stated in my hypothesis. This concept is important to my study as it’s the factor that will essentially be proven or disproven.

My first context for the study is taken from Eirene Mitsos and Ken Browne-Boys’ underachievement. Mitsos and Browne (1998) believe that boys are underachieving in education, although they also believe girls are disadvantaged. The evidence of boy’s underachievement, according to Mitsos and Browne, is that:

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‘’Girls do better than boys in every stage of National Curriculum SAT results in English, Maths and Science, and they are now more successful than boys at every level in GCSE, outperforming boys in every major subject….except Physics.’’

Mitsos and Browne suggest a range of reasons for why boys’ underachieve. Two stood out to be in particular.

  1. While boys run around kicking footballs, playing sports or computer games and engaging in other aspects of ‘’laddish’’ behaviour, girls are more likely to read or stand around talking, which means girls tend to develop their linguistic skills more than boys. ...

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