1. Starter - Whiteboards Strengths & Limitations of documents…

2. MIC Lesson 5 Secondary sources (documents & official statistics)
Objectives:
To recap on the strengths and limitations of documents
To apply this knowledge to the study of education
To plan an answer to a MIC question

3. Starter Strengths & Limitations of documents…5
Strengths
Limitations 4 3 2 1

8. Planning… IN CONTEXT You will need the following:
Your green PERVERT help sheet
Your other RSM booklet
highlighter
Motivation!

9. Step 1. Read through & highlight item
Read through the item and highlight key points. This question needs slightly more thinking power, why?

10. Official statistics
You need to think about which official statistics could we use to investigate social class differences in achievement…
Jot as many ideas down as you can on your whiteboard.

11. Free school meals

12. Exam results

13. Other official stats sociologists could use to investigate class differences in achievement…
% of students going onto higher education
% of students going onto vocational courses

14. Step 3. Plan the question Plan the question IN CONTEXT
In relation to studying social class differences in achievement using official statistics
Use some examples of official statistics that could be used to investigate this topic
Use your booklets & sheets to help you
IN CONTEXT…

15. Mingle!
Take your booklets and go to a different group – share ideas, is there any points you have got that they haven’t and vice versa?

16. Strengths Limitations
P- statistics such as % of 5 A*-C GCSE’s help sociologists make comparisons between the achievements of difference social groups based on class differences in education.
If for example sociologists wanted to use exam results, these are collected at regular intervals, therefore sociologists can see trends over time in terms of class differences in achievement
E- there would be very little ethical concerns investigating class and educational achievement using official statistics. This is because the data has been made public, and permission for their use is not required.
R- official statistics can be highly representative, for example, all schools will need to publish GCSE grades each year, this could mean that a representative sample would be obtained to highlight class differences in achievement. FSM is also officially recorded. V-
E- examples of official statistics that could be used to investigate class – explain why they may be useful?
R- official statistics can be highly reliable to investigate class differences. Sociologists can look at class for example and correlate this with parental income to discover cause-and-effect relationships. Positivists may be able to conclude poverty causes underachievement,
T- Positivists would favour the use of official statistics in this case because they provide quantitative data and can be use to generalise to a wide population, gaining a representative data set to draw conclusions in relation to class and achievement
P- governments select statistics for their own policy purposes. For example, sociologists are very interested in the relationship between language, social class and achievement but there are no official statistics on this, meaning the stats used may not be representative. E-
R-however, some parents don’t claim their FSM or declare their salary, therefore it may not accurately represent class as accurately as you would hope.
V- Interpretivists may question whether using official statistics to investigate class differences is valid, this is because they argue statistics are socially constructed. For example, the way a student qualifies for FSM is dependent on what may be classed as ‘low income’ not taking other factors into account. There is also danger that schools may manipulate their figures.
R- the reliability of using official statistics to investigate class can be questioned. For example the definition’s of different levels of class have changed and do change over time. Therefore this creates problems in comparing results over time. T-

17. Step 4: Write the question
Intro – interactionalists/positivists prefer the use of official statistics because?... 3 PEELs – strength/weakness Conclusion – triangulation (combining methods) which methods could you use to investigate social class differences in achievement use 2 or more.

18. Documents in context…
The contexts you may be asked about in relation to secondary sources are:
ethnic, class and gender differences in achievement
The curriculum
Racist incidents in school
Special educational needs

19. Practical Issues
Using page 157 complete the notes on page 57 of your booklet. Aim for 2  and 2 

20. reliability
+ many documents are produced in a systematic format (e.g registers) this enables researchers to make direct comparisons of the absence rates of pupils in different schools. + some educational documents can be used in ways that other researchers can replicate e.g using content analysis (finding themes) to compare data from educational documents. - Accidental mistakes made when filling in registers reduce their reliability because teachers are not measuring attendance consistently