The concept of educational achievement is a very broad area within the sociology of education. This article will briefly consider the nature of what educational achievement is, giving an introductory overview to the topic. It should be noted that educational achievement and educational attainment are often considered as different things. As with all sociological concepts, there may be conflation or a blurred line between them and they often overlap. In this article, I will lay out some of the main academic talking points surrounding educational achievement.
Defining Educational Achievement
Educational achievement is the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and credentials by an individual. It is a relational concept rather than absolute. This means that educational achievement is seen as relative to some indicator such as improvement in performance or similar progress made by an individual. This is in contrast to the absolute concept of attainment which is the reaching of various milestones or levels of education.
What Affects Educational Achievement?
There is a vast array of phenomena which can affect the educational achievement of the individual, and each constitutes an area of study in itself. These are often categorised into two overarching categories: ‘internal factors’ and ‘external factors’. Internal factors refer to the things that can affect educational achievement inside the educational institution itself. External factors refer to things that can affect educational achievement outside of any educational institution. Although the various things which make up these categories are listed individually, they are often found to occur simultaneously and what happens outside of education can be brought into education and vice versa.
External Factors
External factors refer to the influences on an individual’s experiences outside of an educational institution, particularly in the home environment. Many of these are related to living standards or material influences. Again, each of these constitutes an area of research in and of itself:
Material Influences on Educational Achievement
Material deprivation is almost always linked to lack of money and financial resources:
- Lack of appropriate equipment
- Lack of books and textbooks
- Lack of access to computers or internet
- Living in a disadvantaged area
- Poor housing
- Overcrowded conditions
- Lack of quiet spaces
- Poor diet
- Lack of access to extra-curricular activities and trips
- Having to work to support study
- Moving around frequently
- Fear of debt
- Being eligible for free school meals
Cultural Influences on Educational Achievement:
Depending on how you are culturally located, this can have an influence on educational achievements. Cultural influences can mean how class-culture manifests, cultural attitudes towards gender, or ethnic and racial-cultural differences.
Class-Cultural Influences on Educational Achievement:
- Working class fatalism (meaning that you feel consigned to doing badly due to being working class)
- Immediate instead of deferred gratification (meaning that you don’t think staying in education will improve your situation later down the line and so opt for entering waged employment sooner)
- Having parents who are oppositional or disinterested in the value of education
- Peer-pressure (particularly in the UK where being good at school can often lead to being the target of abuse and so one opts to stay in line with the group)
- Lack of role-models who may convey a positive image of education
- Abrasion between working-class and middle-class values
- Education seen as a middle- or upper-class pursuit
- Middle-class privileging of educational pursuits
- Middle- or upper-class nepotism culture
Gender-Cultural Influences on Educational Achievement:
- Being male is often associated with being misbehaved or disruptive
- Being male can be associated with work encouraging males to abandon further education in favour of employment
- Being female can be associated with motherhood and domestic duty therefore encouraging females to fall in line with a deterministic view that they will not need education due to being a mother or having domestic duties.
Ethnic-Racial-Cultural Influences on Educational Achievement:
For example, whites who are working class boys are all associated with the above negatives in both class-cultural and gender-cultural views. In Chinese culture for example, there is a very heavy emphasis on education with children being socialised into the belief of educational excellence. Similar principles apply to the Japanese too.
Linguistic Influences on Educational Achievement:
The way in which an individual speaks has been considered as an indicator for educational achievement.
Class-Linguistic Influences on Educational Achievement:
- Working-class as having less developed vocabulary
- Middle-class as having better developed vocabulary
- The first two are also known as ‘restricted’ and ‘elaborated’ code
- Local dialect. For example, ‘scouse’ (Liverpool), Cockney (London), or ‘manc’ (Manchester) are often seen as working-class.
- Received Pronunciation. This is the reference point for English speakers and generally considered middle-class.
Ethnic-Racial-Linguistic Influences on Educational Achievement:
- Only speaking a language which differs from the country of residence
- Only partially speaking the language of the country of residence
- Socialisation through speaking one language in the family home and then another in education
For an example, have a look at the BBC Pidgin language website. Pidgin is a form of English used in West Africa. Ask yourself whether this form of English would be acceptable in a UK school for a West African migrant living in the UK. Would UK educational policy standards have meant failure or success when using Pidgin? Pidgin, Creole, or Patois for example, are often interpreted as being ‘broken English’. If you are feeling brave you can also check out the Creole Interference Hypothesis (also called Middle English Creole Hypothesis) which argues that English is, in fact, a Creole or Pidgin language.
It is easy to view this from an English-speaking perspective. However, we can place ourselves in the same situation by imagining ourselves in Sweden for example where we only know limited or no Swedish language.
Together these all present an overview of possibilities for external influences on educational achievement.
Internal Factors
Internal factors are the practices and processes which occur inside of the educational institution itself both at the macro and micro levels of analysis. A macro factor would be something like a national policy and a micro factor could be the way in which an individual is treated by a teacher. Each of course has significant ramifications for educational achievement. Some major considerations for internal factors include:
Labelling Influences on Educational Achievement:
Labelling is almost a field in itself and is often located within deviance studies. It refers to the idea that an individual is assigned a label and that label can either be internalised by the individual, or the people around them can view the individual through the qualities or attributes that the label conveys. In basic terms, a child who is labelled naughty may internalise that ‘naughty’ label and continue to act naughty in accordance with expectations. It can lead to individuals being ‘typecast’ so to speak, and the option to change is closed off.
Streaming Influences on Educational Achievement:
This refers to the idea that individuals are placed into groups based on ability as opposed to performance. This means that an individual will be with the same group for most or all of their subjects. It can result in pupils being ‘written off’ in the belief that they have lesser ability. This can also manifest in racist beliefs whereby Black or other ethnic denomination is regarded as being inherently inferior.
Setting Influences on Educational Achievement:
Setting is similar to streaming except that individuals are placed into classes or ‘sets’ for different subjects. Achievement may be constrained for example, by what level of exam an individual in a given set is allowed to sit. In the UK, pupils in certain maths sets are often not allowed to do the higher-level exam paper and must sit a standard level exam paper which has a lower top grade. This means that the highest grades are inaccessible for most maths students.
Self-fulfilling Prophecy Influences on Educational Achievement:
Labelling, streaming, and setting can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Again, if we take the child labelled as naughty, and that child internalises the label and continues to be naughty, then the prophecy that they will not achieve anything due to being naughty will eventually come true. If a pupil is placed into a low set, they can also experience low self-esteem and believe that they ‘just cannot do the subject’. This, in turn, also creates a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby they have internalised that belief to the point where they either give up or give minimum effort and so fail to achieve.
Subcultural Influences on Educational Achievement:
Subcultural refers to the existence of a subgroup (a group within a group) who share beliefs which differ from that of the dominant culture. In education this can manifest as:
- Pro- and anti-school attitudes
- Truancy
- Rebellion
- Rejection of institutional values
- Anti-authority stances
Structural Influences on Educational Achievement:
There are various structural influences which may affect educational achievement. Some of these include:
- Institutional racism
- Pedagogy (method of teaching)
- Assessment methods
- Curriculum content
- Ideology
- Policies
- Law
- Time configurations (the way in which time is ordered such as timetabling)
- Routines
Marketisation Influences on Educational Achievement:
Pupils become reframed as a commodity, focus turns towards superficial indicators and the quantification of everything. Education becomes competitive for both pupils and institutions, performance becomes central, and the value of education becomes restricted to a focus on what industry demands rather than the inherent value of education. Money plays a much more central focus and, as such, ever greater pressure is placed on pupils to perform in order for the institution to be granted funding. This can create mental health issues or other stress-related illness which affects educational achievement.
In this article, I have refrained from using any specific references. This is because I will be looking closer at each of these factors individually which affect educational achievement in later articles. For now, however, it should provide a clear overview of the phenomena which affect educational achievement.
