Chapter 8: Taking Care of Children and Pupils: Agreements and Disagreements in Parents’ and Teachers’ Social Representations

It is well established that educational practices are contextually embedded (Matteucci, Carugati, Mazzoni, Selleri, & Tomasetto, 2008). When scholars attempt to conceptualize this topic and to work on that from an empirical point of view, literature offers a huge number of tools. A key contribution is offered by Doise’s European approach (1986) in terms of four levels of analysis of experiments and social practices. According to this approach, context could be analyzed at the intra-individual, inter-individual, situational, and cultural/ideological levels. Such an analytical distinction allows us to articulate these levels as sources of possible influence on each other.

At the intra-individual level, research describes how individuals organize their perception, their evaluation of social milieu, and their behavior within this environment. In such approaches, the interaction between individual and social environment is not dealt with directly, and only the mechanisms by which the individual organizes his/her experience are analyzed. Different approaches have been proposed: research on cognitive development within the Piagetian tradition, balance theory, cognitive dissonance and social categorization theories, attribution theory, and the general approach of social cognition. As far as school judgments are concerned (for instance), as conceived in the framework of realistic and phenomenal paradigms (Kruglansky, 1990), a considerable amount of research has produced evidence about the accuracy of teachers’ judgment about pupils’ performance on standardized tests. Through the correlations between judgments and scores, Hoge and Coldaraci (1989), by means of a meta-analysis of 16 studies, show a variation between .28 and .92 (median .66), which reveals important differences related to specific school subjects, classes, and teachers of the same classes. In the same vein of intra-individual level, some scholars have introduced the notion of high-bias versus low-bias teachers (Bressoux & Pansu, 2003).