Assess the strengths and limitations of experiments for the study of labelling in schools.

Charkin et al 1975 has used 48 university students who each taught a lesson to a ten year old. One third the high expectancy group was told that the boy was highly motivated and intelligent. One third was told that the boy was poorly motivated with a low IQ and One third was given no information. The study has shown that the high expectancy group made more eye contact and gave out more encouraging body language than the low expectancy group. One limitation of this investigation is that there is an ethical concern as real pupils have been used and there was lack of informed consent, problem with deception and psychological damage as young people are vulnerable and their ability to understand what is happening is limited. Strength to this study is that lab experiments usually examine one specific aspect of teacher expectations such as body language this is useful as it allows the researcher to isolate and examine this variable more thoroughly. However this means that the teacher expectations are not seen within wider process of labelling.

In practice it is impossible to identify let alone control all the variables that might exert an influence on teacher’s expectations as schools are large institutions in which many variables may affect teacher’s expectations such as class size, streaming, type of school etc.

Rosenthal and Jacobson carried out a field experiment in California primary school. Pupils were given an IQ test and teachers were then told that this had enabled the researchers to identify 20% of pupils who were likely to ‘spurt’ in the next year. In reality this wasn’t the case and pupils were in fact randomly selected. The aim was to plant in the minds of teachers a specific set of expectations about their pupils and also to see if this had any on effect on the pupil’s performance. The research design was simple and easy to repeat therefore it was of high reliability which is an advantage. However this research could be lacking validity as the researchers did not carry out any observation of classroom interaction so they had no data to support their claim. There was also lack of broader focus as Rosenthal and Jacobson did not look at the whole labelling process from teacher expectations through to their effect on pupils rather than just examining single elements in isolation.

Using Laboratory ecxperiments in education means that the participants are not in their normal or natural environment this means that any behaviour that may occur is also unnatural or artificial. This is a weakness as the data collected will then be invalid. On the other hand field experiments take place in the subject’s natural surroundings.