Person perception in post-school education

Abstract

This paper takes up a plea made by Hastorf, et al, (1985) that research on social perception should be initially directed towards eliciting the perceptual categories used by individuals to structure their social experience before attempts are made to explain the processes which mediate the different categories.

The exploratory study reported here therefore attempted to elicit the perceptual categories used by lecturers and students in further and higher education to structure their experience of each other and to attempt to investigate whether there were consistent relationships visible between the use of particular categories and the educational role of the participants.

The study was carried out within the framework of Personal Construct Theory because Kelly's ideas seemed to provide a possible way of linking the investigation of social perception with differences in the way a person experiences his or her educational role. Repertory grids describing their students where therefore elicited from thirty lecturers in a variety of further and higher education establishments in South Wales and a further twenty grids describing their lectures elicited from students in the same colleges.

These grids were then individually analysed using Higginbotham and Kelly's GAB computer program and a content analysis made of the variety of verbal labels used. The ten most frequently used constructs were then supplied to the same subjects to form a second common grid which was comparatively analysed using Slater's ADELA computer package.

Results seemed to show that while lecturers in all educational fields shared some constructs to discriminate between students, many of the constructs used differed from field to field with a tendency to used intellectual constructs in higher education and behavioural constructs in further education. In contrast, students in all educational fields shared a concern with the personal approachability and teaching effectiveness of their lecturers.

It is suggested that these differences between lecturer and student perception of each other may have important implications for educational relationships.