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The AQA produces an examiner report after every exam, and it’s very good advice to look at these reports to see common mistakes students made last year, so you can avoid making the same mistakes this year!
Below I’ve selected FIVE choice pieces of advice based on the two most common errors from the 2018 Education with Theory and Methods paper.
For the short answer questions, make sure you get your ID and Development the right way round – for example, last year’s 4 mark question was on ‘two reasons why marketisation policies may create social class differences in educational achievement’ – many students started with a policy rather than a reason, they should have started with a reason and then illustrated with a policy.
The six marker was ‘outline three reasons for gender differences in educational achievement – the report says that many students did not get a second mark because they failed to be specific enough in their application to gender or educational achievement, so be specific!
For question 5 – the methods in context question – the best answers used the hooks in the item, so use the item!
At the other end of the paper – the final 10 mark theory and methods and question, a lot of students seemed to run out time to answer this, so make sure you get your timing right. Remember that it’s almost certainly going to be easier to get 4/10 for a 10 mark question than to go from 12/20 to 16/20 on a methods in context question – the bar’s lower after all!
Focussing on the final 10 marker – if you get another ‘criticise a theory’ type question’ then the best answers simply used other perspectives to develop their criticisms.
It seems that the 10 marker with item and 30 mark essay question were OK!
Sources
All information taken from the AQA’s 7192/1 examiner report.
A Level Sociology Revision Webinars starting April 2019
I will be running a series of 12 A-level sociology revision webinars to cover the entire two year A-level sociology specification (AQA) including exam technique for the various question formats on the three AQA A-level sociology exam papers (7192/1, 7192/2 and 7193/3).
The webinars are scheduled for 19.00 every Monday (with one on a Thursday) and will run from Monday 1st of April to Monday 20th June, 2 days before the last exam (crime and deviance with theory and methods). Webinars are scheduled early so that we can get through the entire specification BEFORE the first paper (on May 22nd).
NB Registration will only be open during March and the first two weeks of April, then it will close!
Schedule (please see below for a more detailed version)
Monday 1st April – Education 1
Monday 8th April – Education 2
Monday 15th April – Families and Households 1
Monday 22nd April – Beliefs in Society
Monday 29h April – Crime and Deviance 1
Monday 6th May – Crime and Deviance 2
Monday 13th May – Research Methods
Thursday 16th May – Social Theories
Monday 20th May – Education and Theory and Methods 3 (exam on 22nd June )
Monday 27th May – Request webinar, content TBC
Monday 3rd June – Families and Beliefs 2 (exam on 4th June)
Monday 10th June – Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods 3
All of these webinars will last 45 minutes to one hour during which I will provide a brief overview of some of the content within each topic, and a discussion of at least three specific exam practice questions. Students will be able to ask questions during the Webinar, via text, and there will also be time for students to ask questions at the end.
I will be conducting the Webinars via Click Meeting, which allows students to download support materials in advance of the seminars, ask questions during the seminars via ‘chat’, and which will also allow students to review the seminar afterwards as they will be recorded and stored on the site. Recordings will be available until the 16th of June (several days after the final A-level sociology exam).
Webinar Support materials
The first eight revision Webinars are supported by a PowerPoint, revision notes and exemplar exam questions, and the education, families and methods topics (basically the first year content) have gapped revision hand-outs too, so these really are being offered at a bargain price!
NB – if you have purchased any of my revision bundles, some of these resources are the same. If you’ve already purchased one or more, please let me know and please contact me by email and I can arrange a partial (10% per bundle refund) via PayPal only.
The link will take you to a registration page for my ‘Permanent Room’ on the ClickMeeting platform. This is the room I will be running all revision Webinars from, every Monday (and one Thursday) from April 1st.
Once registered you will receive an email from ClickMeeting which will provide you with an access link which will allow you access my permanent room for March-June 2019. (NB I will only be using this at the scheduled times, as outlined in the schedule.)
Following registration I will also send you an email containing all the relevant revision resources for the 12 Webinars. These will also be downloadable during and immediately after each revision session.
Reminder emails will be sent out the day in advance of each of the 12 Webinar Revision Sessions, and also watch out for a bonus ‘introducing revision Webinars’ session on the final Monday in March, to give you an opportunity to familiarise yourself with how ClickMeeting works.
Payment is via PayPal only!
About your Tutor
I’ve taught sociology for 20 years, 16 of those in a successful sixth form college between 2002 and 2018 (10 years as Head of Department).
In 2014 I set up this blog, and managed to save enough off the back of it to quit working for the ‘man’ and now I work independently, developing non-corporate support materials to facilitate the teaching and learning of A-level sociology.
I also see myself as something of a trail-blazer in developing 16-19 online education: in 2019, we should be doing better than 20 teenagers all having to travel to a central location and then ‘sitting in a room’ for an hour or two. To my mind this all seems a bit 19th century. These Webinars are a move towards making A-level education more flexible and decentralised.
In this post I apply some sociological concepts to develop arguments for and against the view that schools are meritocratic.
This post is really designed to show students how they can apply concepts to this question from across the sociology of education topic within A-level sociology.
Arguments for the view that education is meritocratic
Particularistic values
Functionalists argue that at in school students are judged by universalistic values, so it is more meritocratic than at home where children are judged by different particularistic values.
Schools offer children equality of opportunity and so are fair, it’s the inferior values of working-class parents such as immediate gratification that stops them achieving.
Nearly all schools today, especially academies have a high ethos of achievement.
Pupil Premium
Introduced under The Coalition government, this encourages schools to accept more students from poor backgrounds, helping to combat selection by mortgage, which is not meritocratic.
Other supporting concepts and evidence
Life-long learning, parity of esteem, expansion of modern apprenticeships, compensatory education.
Arguments and evidence against the view that education is meritocratic
Middle class parents have always been more able than working class parents to use their skills to get their kids into the best schools, thus there is not real equality of opportunity
Teachers are more likely to negatively label boys, working class and Black Caribbean children as problem students, meaning they are held back through being put in lower bands.
Unfairly benefitted middle class parents through selection by mortgage and the school-parent alliance.
Other criticising concepts and evidence
Banding and streaming, myth of meritocracy, hidden curriculum, ethnocentric curriculum.
Sociology Teaching Resources for Sale
If you’re a sociology teacher and you like this sort of thing, and you want to support my resource development work, then you might like these teaching resources for the sociology of education. They are specifically designed for A-level sociology students and consist of three documents:
I’ve been designing some sociology of education summary grids to try and summarise the AQA’s A-level sociology of education specification as briefly as possible. I’ve managed to narrow it down to 7 grids in total covering…..
Perspectives on education (Functionalism etc)
In-school processes (labelling etc.)
social class and differential achievement
gender: achievement and subject choice
Ethnicity
Policies
Globalisation and education (I couldn’t fit it in anywhere else!)
Here’s a couple of them… I figure these should be useful for quick card sorts during revision lessons. And let’s face it, there is only ONE thing students love more than filling in grids, and that’s a card sort!
Perspectives on education summary grid:
Education policies summary grid:
Of course I couldn’t resist doing fuller versions of these grids too, but more of that laters!
This is one possible example of a 10 mark ‘with item’ question which could come up in the AQA’s A level sociology paper 2: topics in sociology (section B: beliefs in society option).
Read the item, and then answer the question below.
Item
Older people are more likely to both attend church and express religious beliefs than younger people.
Some sociologists have suggested that this is due to changes which occur during the life-course. Other sociologists believe this trend is more about social changes resulting in generational differences.
Applying material from the item, analyse two reasons why younger people are generally less religious than older people
The first reason why older people are more religious is that as they come to the end of their ‘life course’, they are simply biologically closer to death which means they start to think more about what happens after death. This is something which all religions deal with, and so it could simply be that older people become more religious because they find a suitable explanation to their questions about the afterlife in religion.
This could be especially the case today, as modern society is obsessed with ‘youth and life’ and so religion is one of the few places people close to death might find solace.
A related life course related factor is social isolation. As people enter retirement, they lose their work place connections, and are more likely to see their friends die. Attending church could be a way of making up for these lost connections.
The second possible reason is social changes – meaning that each successive generation is less religious than the previous generation.
The church has gradually become disengaged from society and so has less influence over social life: thus children today are much less likely to see religious authority being exercised in politics, and religion has also lost its influence in education: RE is now somewhat watered down compared to what it used to be: presenting religion as a choice rather than a necessity.
Also, now that society has become more postmodern, it emphasizes, fun, diversity and choice, all of which traditional religion at least doesn’t offer as much of: people would rather spend Sunday relaxing rather than in church, and this is very much normal today.
As a result of all the above, parents are much less likely to socialize their children into religious beliefs and practices, which explains the decline in religion across the generations and between younger and older people today.
This is one possible example of a 10 mark ‘with item’ question which could come up in the AQA’s A level sociology paper 2: topics in sociology (section B: beliefs in society option).
Read the item, and then answer the question below.
Item
Karl Marx famously argued that religion was the ‘opium of the masses’ and Simone de Beauvoir argued that religion compensated women for their second class status. Both theorists believed that religion was an ideological tool which pacified the oppressed.
These views have, however, been criticized:
Applying material from the item, analyse two criticisms of the view that religion is merely a tool of oppression (10)
Firstly, Marxist and Feminist views tend to downplay the positive functions of religion.
As Functionalists have pointed out, it is quite likely that some form of religious belief and organisation is functional (i.e. beneficial for the individual and society) given that religion is practically universal (i.e found in nearly all societies).
Functionalists have pointed to many positive functions of religion – such as helping people deal with death and societies deal with transition and times of uncertainty. Rather than this being about simply keeping inequality in place, it could be that religion benefits everyone by keeping society stable.
Furthermore, people still practiced religion in secret in communist countries when religion was banned, suggesting that they actively wanted religion for their own comfort, rather than it simply being something forced on them by elites.
You could argue that a similar thing is found with religion today in the form of ‘civil religion’ – where people find comfort in quasi-religious ceremonies such as Football matches and Royal Weddings… again this seems to be a matter of choice, and because attendance is optional, it’s hard to argue that these ‘shallower’ forms of religion have a sinister social control function like Marxists and Feminists suggest!
Secondly, The above theories assume that people simply passively accept an elitist interpretation of religious doctrines. There is plenty of evidence that this is not always the case.
Liberation theology is a good example of this: where Catholic Church leaders in Latin America took the side of the landless peasants, and argued against the elitist interpretation that inequality was God’s will: instead helping the poor fight back against inequality and elite institutions and attempting to bring about a more equal society.
This is supporting evidence for the Neo-Marxist view that religion is not simply controlled by elites, but is relatively autonomous, thus meaning it can be a tool for social change.
From an Islamic Feminist point of view, Nawal el Sadawi argued that Islam was not inherently patriarchal, but rather that it had been interpreted in a patriarchal way in patriarchal societies (patriarchy comes first, if you like!). She further argued that it was perfectly possible for women to challenge Patriarchal interpretations of Islam, as she herself did, thus meaning it doesn’t have to be a tool of social control and pacification.
A postmodern analysis of religion further supports the ‘active intepretation’ criticisms of Marxism and Feminism – today people are much more likely to pick and mix their religious beliefs, and reject anything they don’t like, and use religion at selected times when they find it useful. This is hardly religion controlling and pacifying the population!
This is one possible example of a 10 mark ‘with item’ question which could come up in the AQA’s A level sociology paper 2: topics in sociology (section B: beliefs in society option).
Read the item, and then answer the question below.
Item
Feminists have criticized many traditional religions such as Christianity and Islam for being patriarchal: positions of power within the traditional institutions of both religions are largely controlled by men, an both tend to support traditional roles for men and women.
Feminists have also suggested that the New Age Movement appeals much more to women because it celebrates many aspects of femininity that traditional institutions seek to repress.
Applying material from the item, analyse two reasons for gender differences in the membership of religious organisations (10)
Suggested answer
Simone de Beauvoir suggested that Christianity offered women spiritual compensation for accepting their inferior roles in society as housewives and mothers.
However, now that more women are in work, and they place less emphasis on the importance of such traditional gender roles, there is less need for such spiritual compensation, hence why the numbers of women attending church may be declining.
Middle class women especially may find the New Age Movement appealing because it allows them to ‘shop’ for their particular therapy, and demands very low levels of commitment.
the NAM is also less focused on social roles, and allows women (and men) a much greater degree of freedom to express their feminine sides – it celebrates nurturing and caring and emotion in a much more ‘fun’ way than traditional churches tend to, which again might appeal to postmodern women more.
It is also more accepting of diversity and thus much less likely to look down on women who are divorced.
Secondly, traditional religious organisations tend to encourage the repression of female sexuality: Catholicism for example is anti-abortion and anti-contraception.
This does not fit in age of female sexual liberation and greater sexual promiscuity. Since the contraception and the pill (what Giddens calls ‘plastic sexuality’), which may explain why women are turning away from the church.
In contrast, the New Age Movement actually celebrates female sexuality. This may also explain why men don’t feel that attracted the the NAM, maybe they are threatened by empowered women, reflecting a crisis of masculinity.
Finally, the New Age Movement, in its pick and mix approach and celebration of diversity, is more likely to appeal to gender diverse individuals, as it is not against homosexuality like more traditional religions tend to be.
A-level sociology is a new subject for most students as the vast majority have not studied it as a GCSE option. This means that most colleges and schools offering the subject will need to run some kind of ‘information session’ covering what A-level sociology is all about.
Below is an outline of the 25-30 minute ‘information session’ which I’ve used to introduce sociology to students for the last several years.
NB despite the fact that there’s a little ‘warm up quiz’ at the beginning, this isn’t a ‘teaching session’, or a ‘taster session’, these come before and after, this is more of a ‘here’s the information about the subject to get it clear in your head whether you’re choosing the right course for you’ session.
Intro Quiz
The questions have been selected to cover some of the topics we teach, I simply hand out a sheet with a few ‘pop questions’ – and it gets students talking to each other, and allows time for late-comers (if your ‘intro day’ is anything like my college’s quite a few students’ previous sessions overrun, or they get lost en route, so there’s lateness.
A section of the ‘pop questions’ I use…
What is the current population of the United Kingdom?
What percentages of marriages end in divorce in the UK?
What percentage of children achieved 5 GCSEs grades A-C last year?
Is the crime rate in Britain going up or down?
In 1993 there were roughly 45 000 people in jail, what is the prison population today?
There’s actually eight questions in total, see the Word doc below for the full, and modifiable version!
2. Answers to intro quiz – on ppt
I Q and A through the answers, sometimes doing the old ‘hands up if you think crime is going down’ technique – which works great for that particular question when you get to congratulate the one or two people who got the ‘right answer’.
This can actually take up to 15 minutes, as there’s plenty of scope to use Q and A to tease out most of the main themes in the A level sociology specification…. E.G. how do we actually know how many people are in the UK, where does the data come from? (At which point you get to smugly say ‘OK and where does Google get the information from’)
3. Lightening speed run through of the options we do
NB – I’ve actually got further slides covering some of the main questions under most of the above headings, except methods, I’m supposed to be selling the subject at this stage!
4. Lip service mention of the skills required for A-level sociology
NB – I could add on a slide about ‘careers’, but frankly, I was never worried about this when I chose my degree let alone my A-levels (although in my state grammar school as a non-science students I was pretty much limited to English Literature, Economics and History), and so I say give the kids a break!
Answers to the AQA’s A-level sociology crime with theory and methods exam, June 2018… Just a few thoughts to put students out of their misery. (Ideas my own, not endorsed by the AQA).
Please scroll down for links to other papers!
I won’t produce the exact questions below, just the gist…
Q01 – Outline two ways in which gender may influence the risk of being a victim of crime (4)
Difficulty – easy
Men and masculinity – aggressiveness, linked to higher levels male victims of street crime.
Women and domestic violence – linked to patriarchal norms, gender roles.
And then ideally explain how they differentially effect at least two ethnic groups.
Q02 – Three criticisms of the labelling theory of crime (6)
Difficulty – anywhere from easy to difficult…
If you’ve realised this is a ‘stock question’ that’s been waiting to happen for a while, easy, but if you’re not prepared…. it’s tricky to get beyond the ‘deterministic’ criticism.
If you scroll down to the bottom of my 2016 post on the labelling theory of crime, you’ll find five criticisms at the end of it!
Q03 – Analyse two reasons for social class differences in official crime statistics (10)
Difficulty – easy
The item clearly directs you to one application of labelling theory and one application of ‘underlying differences’.
Police and courts more likely to label wc/ Underclass behaviour as criminal – apply Cicourel. Contrast to white collar crime going unnoticed.
Greater motivation due to poverty (risk) and opportunity… link to left realism, opportunity structures.
Q04 Evaluate sociological contributions to our understanding of the relationship between the media and crime (30)
Difficulty – medium
Fair question, difficult/ niche topic.
The item directs you to relative deprivation and moral panics so you can apply strain theory, Marxism, and interactionism – quite easy.
Then New Media – so cyber crime maybe linked to postmodernism.
Of course, anyone whose done the media option will have an unfair advantage here. This is something of a problem, then again I can say the same about any of my students getting a question on globalisation and crime, given that they do the global development option.
Difficulty – easy
Q05 – Outline and explain two disadvantages of using laboratory experiments in sociological research (10)
Answers to the AQA’s A-level sociology (7192/2) ‘topics’ exam: beliefs in society, section B only. Just a few thoughts to put students out of their misery. (Ideas my own, not endorsed by the AQA)
I won’t produce the exact questions below, mainly because I haven’t actually seen the paper at time of writing, just the gist..
Q13: Outline and explain two ways in which globalisation may affect religious beliefs and practices(10)
I would have gone for two very general ‘ways’ and then expanded on them….
Firstly I would have gone for ‘postmodernisation of religion’ – the decline in the numbers of people being dogmatic about religion as people access more and more information about a wider and wider array of religions, and discuss how the new ages movement and ecumenicalism expand
Secondly I would have used Fundamentalism as a reaction to secular globalism.
Q14 – Analyse two reasons why minority ethnic groups in the UK are often more religious that the majority of the population
Using the item as a base, you would have had to have gone for:
Minority ethnic groups arriving with a different culture from the host society – you can apply Weberianism and cultural transition theory to this.
Members of minority groups facing racism… developed using the cultural defence theory, possibly using Pentecostalism as an example. You could also throw in some Marxist analysis to beef it up.
Q15: Evaluate the view that an increase in spirituality in the UK has compensated for the decline of organised religion
This is basically Postmodernism/ new ageism + secularisation. My plan would have looked something like this:
Outline key features of NAMs (in item)
Postmodern explanations of NAMs- growth individualism/ rejection metanarratives
Outline (briefly) evidence on the decline of organised religion (secularisation)
Postmodern explanations of organised religion – doesn’t FIT PM society!
Highlight what NAMs do that Organised religion used to do… (arguing for the view in the question) – e.g.
Criticise the view in the question… highlighting the differences between NAMs and organised religion…
Conclusion… it isn’t replacing organised religion and that’s a god thing?
Eight mind maps covering the sociological perspectives on beliefs in society. In colour!
52 Pages of revision notes covering the entire AQA ‘beliefs in society’ specification: from perspectives on religion, organisations, class, gender ethnicity and age and secularisation, globalisation and fundamentalism.
Three 10 mark ‘outline and explain’ practice exam questions and model answers
Three 10 mark ‘analyse using the item’ 10 practice exam questions and answers
Three 30 mark essay questions and extended essay plans.
The content focuses on the AQA A-level sociology specification. All at a bargain price of just £4.99!
I’ve taught A-level sociology for 16 years and have been an AQA examiner for 10 of those, so I know what I’m talking about, and if you purchase from me you’re avoiding all those horrible corporations that own the major A-level text books and supporting a fully fledged free-range human being, NOT a global corporate publishing company.
