SFP and streaming

self-fulfilling prophecy

when the teacher labels a student in a certain way, they treat the student like that label - they internalise it and then become what they have been labelled as

Becker

coined labelling theory and says the master status is the way we define ourselves

Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968

field experiment manipulating teachers’ perceptions on ‘spurters’ telling teachers these students had great academic potential

at the end of experiment ‘spurters’ achieved more progress than those not labelled - positively labelled

streaming

splitting pupils into different ability groups - each group is taught separately from others SFP is likely to occur when children are streamed

WC kids more likely to be put in lower sets and once you’re in a set it is hard to move, this locks in the teachers’ expectations

Douglas

looked at primary schools and found those in lower sets, their IQ had dropped whereas those in the higher sets, theirs had gone up

Gillborn and Youdell 2001 - A\*-C economy

loads of pressure on schools to get as many passing grades as possible since they were judged by it. teachers use stereotypical view of ability and associate cultural class with academic ability and label MC kids as gifted

educational triage

teachers rank kids and put ones that will pass anyway into top sets and leave them to get on with it

best teachers on middle ground so they can improve the kids that need it most

the WC kids who are doomed to fail are left alone in the bottom set and just let them fail

limitations

not all students of lower class accept labels

too deterministic

focuses on negative effects of labelling

attributes too much importance to teacher agency, might be the school that encourages labelling