WEEK 12 (Topic 11)

 Explaining Unequal Achievement

In this topic, it is more focus on the explaining unequal achievement. I have learned about the overview of unequal achievement from biological, historical and cultural explanations. Unequal achievement means the unequal distribution of academic resources, including but not limited to school funding, qualified and experienced teachers, books, and technologies to socially excluded communities. The factors of unequal achievement among students are family factor, low socio-economic factor and less qualified teacher. From biological explanations, the factor who determine the unequal achievement are traditional attitudes towards gender roles, poverty and early marriage and pregnancy. From historical explanations, in the World war 1, IQ testing stated that there are differences between the average scores of different population groups. No agreement regarding the factors. But, as time goes on until today, the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain differences in IQ test performance between racial groups. Lastly, the cultural explanations, based on the three different theories which are the cultural deficit theory, the expectation theory and the cultural difference theory, These theories explain clearly how they see about the unequal achievements.