ABSTRACT
I set out to establish precisely how accurate children’s perceptions of their class positions were. First of all I obtained from three teachers rank orders of ability on three measures; number, writing, and reading, for the children in their classes. Each child was then seen individually and asked to point to the names, written on cards arranged randomly on the desk before him, of the ‘people a wee bit better than you at number’. The same procedure was followed for testing whom the child thought better than himself at reading and writing. From these data it was possible to estimate each child’s selfperceived class position. For example, if a child pointed to ten children as a ‘wee bit better’ than himself, he was assumed to regard his position in the class as eleventh. It is necessary to be quite clear about what was happening here. The teachers’ rankings were made at my request and were not communicated to their pupils. In theory the children should have had no idea of their class positions and had I directly asked children what their positions were I suspect I should have got some strange answers. But tested in this indirect way children aged as young as eight gave themselves positions which correlated highly with those assigned them by their teacher. The complete figures are given in Table 1….
