Cultural capital and the perception of feedback

Abstract

This study draws on the concept of cultural capital to determine whether the cultural capital of students is related to their perceptions of classroom interactions, specifically teacher–student feedback practices. The analysis of new data in ‘Feedback and Cultural Capital,’ a Danish survey of feedback practices among 14-year-old and 15-year-old students (N = 1101), showed a positive and practically linear relationship between the cultural capital of the students and the amount of feedback they perceived in lower secondary mathematics classrooms. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction in education, I argue that this inequality stems from either or both of two mechanisms: differences in treatment by teachers and/or differences in the perceptions of students. I link both mechanisms to the cultural capital of the students. Furthermore, the results indicate that the relationship was stronger for boys than for girls. The implications of the findings for practice and policy are discussed.

Keywords:

• Perceived feedback
• cultural capital
• student perspective
• educational inequality
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A comparison of sample and population means in selected variables is available upon request.

2 For more information, see http://eng.uvm.dk/primary-and-lower-secondary-education/the-folkeskole (retrieved September 24, 2018).

3 The intraclass correlation on social background in Denmark is 0.16 based on data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 (own calculations. Data available at: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/data/2015database/). The OECD average is 0.26. An intraclass correlation of 0.16 indicates that a large proportion of the between–student variation in social background is within schools not between schools.

4 Three times a year, students in the eighth and ninth grades in Denmark receive grading from their teacher on their abilities in calculation, problem-solving, and verbal argumentation based on their performance in class.

5 I was not possible to add schools as a third level because there are not enough classrooms within each school.