inequality of educational opportunities
...my own and as I have limited time to carry out my research I have decided to use quantitative methods based on a social survey using questionnaires as the main way I will collect my data. I will also use the interpretivist approach which will produce some qualitative data. I plan to do a few in depth interviews, as they will show me my respondents feelings about the education system and this type of qualitative data will complement the quantitative data I will get from the questionnaires and improve the validity of the research. The questionnaire will be targeted towards the two ethnic groups I am studying. My research will be targeted towards years 10 and 11 students from my own school. I will have equal numbers from both ethnic groups, and I will have equal number of males and females. My chosen sample size who will fill out the questionnaires will be 40 people from each ethnic group, 20 males & 20 females. My chosen sample size who will be interviewed will be a male and a female from each of the two ethnic groups I am researching. I realise that a very wide variety of factors influence educational achievement and I believe that it would be impossible for me to investigate them all in the time that I have available. For this reason I have decided to focus my research on the factors connected to the school. I am aware that the home background of the students may well affect their level of educational achievement, but I have decided to focus my research solely on the effects of school due to time limitations. My first aim of this research is to compare the educational achievement of these two groups by looking at GCSE & A level results currently and in the past. My second aim is to find out if the curriculum has something to do with the level of educational achievement of different ethnic minorities (in this case Afro-Caribbean and European students), e.g. if it is biased or structured in such a way that it makes it seem less relevant and interesting to Afro-Caribbean students compared to European students. ...