Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Experiments - Coggle Diagram
Experiments
Field experiments
Disadvantages
Ethical issues - if a study, such as Rosenthal's and Jacobson's, is done where only certain pupils benefit from it, it may alter the way students perceive themselves and the way that teachers teach eg. show more/less attention and encouragement where appropriate. This will hinder some student's academic achievement and accelerate others. Therefore deception is better in field experiments as then they cannot alter their behaviour accordingly to please the researchers.
Reliability - not easily replicated as watching behaviour that is naturally occurring and so what you will be observing will be different wherever you go.
Advantages
Broader focus - can look at all expectations of teachers as you would be looking at their behaviour more broadly as you can't control the aspect you want to look at, so you have a more holistic view.
Less artificial - field experiments take place in the place of research you are interested in ie. education would be looked at in schools. This means you get a more realistic result that would be occurring as you are not manipulating different variables.
Laboratory experiment
Advantages
Focus - lab experiments usually only examine one specific aspect of teacher expectations, such as body language. This can be useful because it allows the researcher to isolate and examine this variable more thoroughly.
High control - you will know that no other external factors will have influenced the way a teacher has behaved when studying them as the researcher controls any extraneous variable around them.
Practical application - the results concluded have to be published and so other professions can use what is found to alter things for the better. For example, at university, the lecturer can teach students who are studying teaching about the findings and the significant impact the results could have on them when they become teachers, so that they become aware of behaviour they would normally not think about.
Reliability - can easily repeat lab experiments as they use standardised instructions and so they can be replicated. This is good for research into education as it means you can use small samples from different areas as you can conduct the same experiment and then compare after it.
Disadvantages
Ethical issues - young people's vulnerability and their more limited ability to understand what is happening means that thee are greater problems of deception, lack of informed consent and more psychological damage. These ethical concerns are a major reason why laboratory experiments play only a limited role in educational research.
Narrow focus - teacher expectations are not seen within the wider process of labeling and the self fulfilling prophecy as the research only focuses on one aspect of teachers expectations
Practical problems - as schools are large, complex institutions, many variables may affect teacher expectations eg. class size and type of school. It is impossible to identify, let alone control, all the variables that might exert an influence on teachers' expecations.
Size - sociologists are often interested in the role of large-scale social factors and processes such as the impact of government policies on educational achievement, which cannot be studied in small-scale laboratory settings.
Artificial - studies done, such as Charkin's, used university students instead of teachers which is a weakness as it is unlikely that university students will behave in the same way as an experienced teacher.