As well as a questionnaire I will do an observation to gain lots of information in a sort period of time, they are easy to do and very cheap. Even though this is a good way of getting information, people sometimes change their behaviour to, show off or for any other reason so sometimes if you make your presence obvious then this can occur. I won’t be doing any interviews, as they are extremely time consuming, very expensive, also people may change their answers as they feel their being judged.
Now that I have made a prediction on my expected results I can start gathering my background research. Firstly I will do this by gathering information on the attitudes of young boys and girls in today’s society from the book ‘Sociology – Themes and Perspectives, by Haralambos and Holborn’. I will then gather more secondary research from the Internet on past GCSE results of boys and girls.
My next step in this investigation will be to get sixteen students (eight boys and eight girls) who are sitting there GCSE’s at the moment to fill out questionnaires about their attitudes towards their school work, this will help to find out if the attitudes of the girls is better to that of the boys at the time of taking their GCSE’s. I will then conduct a class study of a year nine group who are just about to start their GCSE work, this will help me to see if girls are concentrating in class more than boy at the time of preparing for their GCSE’s.
I will then take my findings and try to back up my prediction that the change in the role of women from the women’s movement has caused women to work harder (because they have something to prove) and men to ‘slack off’ as their ‘male roles’ are being taken over by the ‘stronger’ women in society.
QUESTIONNAIRE
- Are you Male or Female?
Male
Female
2. Which year are you in?
9
10
11
3. Do you think teachers pay more attention to boys or girls?
Boys
Girls
- What do you do when you get home from school?
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
5. Do teachers expect better from girls than they do boys?
Yes
No
7. How long do you spend on coursework and homework per week?
30mins – 1hour
2 – 3 hours
Other
BACKGROUND RESEARCH
Teachers underestimate girls’ ambitions. Only one girl was mentioned as likely to get a management job and male teachers could not envisage any occupation other than marriage for two thirds of the girls. One girl, who was getting the top marks in her class in both her main A level subjects, and who wanted a career in the diplomatic service, was described by her woman teacher as likely to become ‘the personal assistant to somebody rather important. Pupils echoed the teacher’s views. Both boys and girls, asked to list their class in order of ability, tended to exaggerate the capacity of boys and to downgrade girls. ‘It’s hard to imagine a girl that’s better than me’, one boy said. ‘I can if I try but it is unusual’. Several of the girls in his class were getting better marks than he was but he could not know since marks were not made public.
Main Points:
· Education system has gradually developed since about 1870 people have not always had the right to education.
· 1944 the education system was changed to reflect the new belief in meritocracy.
· 1965 people realised that the system was wasting the talents of too many children and the comprehensive school system was introduced.
· Many people believe the comprehensives have the great drawback that they reflect the neighbourhoods in which they are based, and so those based in middle-class areas are likely to be more successful.
· the current educational system encourages competition between schools with the publication of league tables based on SATS.
· there is much greater control over what is taught in schools with the introduction of the national curriculum.
· there has been a huge expansion in further and higher education.
Schools have gained more power over how to spend the money they receive from government. Schools are encouraged to compete for students on the understanding that the more students they take, the money they receive. This means that they are very keen to have ranking in the league tables. The biggest changes in education since the war have taken place in the secondary schools. The grammar schools were made free schools entirely for children of high ability where as previously they combined clever scholarship winners with children of less ability from the middle classes whose parents could afford the subsidised fees.
Teachers - whether men or women – like boys the best. Teachers of mixed classes give more time, attention, affection and concern to boys than girls. Boys dominate class discussion while girls, often described by teachers and by boys as ‘faceless’, are allowed to sit silent at the back of the class. Teachers are less likely to know girls’ names, and tend to have low expectation of their job prospects. These are the finding of a study of coeducational A level classes in humanities subject (at which girls excel) in a further education college. Interviews show that with teachers and pupils that both men and women teachers took more interest in their male pupils, asking them more questions in class and giving them more help. Teachers were asked which students they were most concerned about, female teachers named boys twice as often as girls. When asked which pupils they were most ‘attached’ to, teachers named boys three times as often as girls.
OBSERVATION
SUBJECT: PERIOD: DATE:
- Boys don’t work as hard as they could, as they’re afraid that other boys will bully them.
- Boys are easily distracted and generally girls are harder working.
- Boys more often than not mess around and do not concentrate fully on the task they have been set.
(TALLY)
OBSERVATION
SUBJECT: Science PERIOD:5 DATE: 13.01.05
BOYS: 16 GIRLS: 9
B B B B
B B B B G B B
G G G B G G B B
G G B G B B
GRAPHS
Both boys and girls said that boys get most of the attention. This was because the boys were messing around and not doing the work set.
Both girls and boys said that behaviour was a problem during the lessons, but that wasn’t as big a problem as the progress of the class work.
Boy and Girls had different ideas about this question but it was riddled with bias as each thought they were superior. I believe that the girl’s expectations are higher from talking to teachers and students.
This graph shows clearly that girls spend longer on their coursework. It has been proved that girl’s finds coursework easier than an exam; this would back up my expectations. Also only 1 boy spent over 3 hours a week on his coursework as a pose to 4 girls.
EVALUATION
My data shows that boys interrupt, on the whole, more than girls and this is a contributing factor to why I think that girls do better than boys at GCSE. Also the fact that during the observations there were nearly double the number interruptions form boys than from girls. As well as almost triple the number of telling offs from teachers to students. The boys only contributed 6 times to the lesson, while the girls contributed 11.
Also from previous research I know that girls are much better at coursework than boys, add this with the fact the girls are spending much more time on their coursework than boys. Now because the GCSE courses are more coursework based the girls are finding it easier. Whereas before when they were purely exam and boys did much better.
ANALYSIS
I think that I have completed my hypothesis in finding out why I think girls do better than boys at GCSE. I could have improved my project by including more observations and doing several interviews with staff and with students, also I would try and interview sociologists that have done similar studies so I could gain more knowledge on the subject and get some other opinions. Also I would have made my action plan much more complicated; by adding these interviews and by interviewing calluses of just boys and just girls to compare the number of interruptions and the levels of learning.