From Leaving CertiFiCate to Leaving SChooL a Longitudinal Study ...

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From Leaving Certificate to Leaving School
Like she give us revision tests once a month and stuff and stuff like
that kind of forces you to study, doesn’t just leave it up to you. (Harris
Street, girls’ school, middle-class intake)
Another group of girls in the latter school emphasised the contribution of
regular testing to their learning and had actually requested that tests be
given more frequently in class:
I’ve asked teachers before to give like tests on stuff we’ve done and
they’ve refused and it’s like ‘why would you not?’. (Harris Street,
girls’ school, middle-class intake)
Among many students, teachers were rated by how closely they stuck to
the curriculum, and students disliked when teachers ‘veered off’ the curriculum,
or at least those aspects of the curriculum which were likely to
‘come up’ on the exam paper:
Like some teachers kind of go off the point sometimes and just waffle
on about pointless things that isn’t on the course and stuff. (Fig
Lane, coed school, middle-class intake)
Like my Home Ec[onomics] teacher, she comes in and she knows
how to cook, she tells us all about how to make mayonnaise today,
that’s not on our course, we don’t care … it’s like too much stuff to
do. (Harris Street, girls’ school, middle-class intake)
It is worth noting that this exam-focused approach was more evident
among students in schools serving more middle-class populations. This
is perhaps not surprising as many educational sociologists attribute the
higher educational performance of middle-class students to the more effective
way in which these young people (and their parents) can successfully
navigate a route through the educational system (see, from contrasting
perspectives, Bourdieu, 1984; Erikson and Jonsson, 1996). Students
are thus acting rationally in choosing to pursue the kind of learning
which is rewarded in the assessment system.
In spite of the emphasis on having to ‘cover’ the curriculum, students
tended to value highly teachers who had an appropriate pace of instruction
and who were willing to explain material that students were finding
difficult: