The conclusion belongs to a new scientific study

Sep 21, 2009 06:30 GMT  ·  By
Children who are perceived as bad are pointed out as different in reception classes
   Children who are perceived as bad are pointed out as different in reception classes

According to a new report released by Manchester Metropolitan University scientists, it may be that being perceived as good or bad in the classroom is not something that is entirely up to the individual children themselves. The paper reveals that, once parents, other students, and teachers form an opinion about a child, then they are very likely to maintain that opinion, despite clear signs that the child is changing his or her behavior. The new work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

The paper also reveals that, when starting out at a new school, the little ones also have little time to develop the kind of social skills required to interpret all the mixed messages they are subjected to that tell them how to behave. In equal parts, these messages come from parents and teachers, on the one hand, and from their peers and older schoolmates, on the other hand. The new MMU research focused on four- and five-year-olds, all of whom were attending reception classes for the first time.

ScienceDaily reports that the scientists took into account a large number of indicators when assessing if a child should be perceived as bad or good in school. Some of these traits included repeatedly punching and kicking other pupils, the failure to comply with adult requests, being noisy in queues, sitting improperly in class, or failing to listen to school staff. All of these factors are very likely to make a child be viewed with concern by teachers and other adults in the school. However, there are cases when such a behavior does not necessarily imply a broader attitude problem.

Teachers get most concerned when the immediate actions of a child seem to imply that something more than “rebellion against authority” is going on inside of them. The MMU team found that the teachers' views of parents could, for example, play a very important role in how a child was viewed in school. Some teachers may think that, because parents have a certain background, they somehow must fail in preparing their child for school. As a result, they view these specific children with suspicion, and are generally inclined to catalog them as “bad apples.”

“Once children's reputations have started to circulate in the staffroom, dining hall and among parents, their behavior easily becomes interpreted as a sign of particular character traits. One of the main functions of the reception year is to form a crowd of individual children into a class and tolerance of diversity is generally low. Classroom discipline is a very public activity and children who do not conform to the rules will be publicly marked as different,” MMU Professor Maggie MacLure says. She conducted the new study with colleague Liz Jones, also a professor at the university.