ABSTRACT
The teacher’s feelings of importance and approval are communicated to the child and perceived by him as positive appraisals. It is likely that the appraisals encourage the child to seek further teacher approval by achieving well and behaving in a manner acceptable to his teacher. Brookover’s research introduces the idea of self-concept as a threshold variable which intervenes between social class and school performance and places behaviour under the control of the individual. Although a person’s choice of action can be regarded as being heavily influenced by background variables there is no commitment to a theory of social determinism. The self-concept of children transferred to grammar school does not rise - as one might reasonably have expected - but it drops as the children’s standard of comparison rises. In Hargreaves’ scheme the pupils most likely to fulfil the teachers’ expectations will be those who are perceived as bright by their teacher.
