A Comparative Study of Educational Attainments in England and Scotland

Abstract

AND I.-Introd.uction. 11.-The samples. 111.-The tests. 1V.-Results. V .-.Summary. VI .-Appendix. VI I .-References.~.-INTRODUCTION. 1~ is generally agreed that Scottish primary education tends to be more formal than English, involving the earlier introduction of, and more thorough drilling in, the three R's, and a greater use of corporal punishment. Writing in 1938, Vernon referred in his Measurement of Abilities to " the appalling efficiency of Scottish teaching methods " (which) " raises the performance of Scottish elementary school children on tests of the three R's by anything from 10 per cent. to 50 per cent. over the English level." And McGregor found, in 1934, that 1 1 -year-old Fife children were roughly two years superior to the American norms on the arithmetic, language and spelling sections of the Public School Achievement Tests, though only thirteen months above on Reasoning Arithmetic and 5 months on Reading Comprehension. As evidence of the supposed further superiority of Scottish secondary education, the larger numbers of pupils entering senior secondary schools than of English pupils entering grammar schools, and the much higher proportion of graduate teachers, are often instanced. However, on the basis of work with a graded word reading test, Vernon (1938) suggested that English educational standards may catch up with Scottish ones after the transfer to secondary schools. And his survey of the abilities of 9,183 18-year Army recruits in 1947 yielded a mean Educational Quotient for Scottish recruits of 98.2, as against 100.0 for Welsh and 100.2 for English ; though relative to their g-test scores, the Scots were still superior educationally. Now, quite apart from national prestige, it is of the utmost educational importance to determine the facts more precisely. Do Scottish methods (in so far as they show any general difference from English) actually produce better results, and is their effect a lasting one ? Or do they, at the cost of greater pressure on young children, produce a merely temporary advantage and possibly even a relative decline when pupils reach adolescence and become more rebellious to adult authority ? A proper answer to such questions would require a large-scale survey by such organisations as the National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales, and the Scottish Council for Research in Education. The Director of the National Foundation (Morris, 1955) has described a similar project in France and Belgium where " the hypothesis to be tested is whether " the initial superiority of French children " is maintained up to the end of the primary school or whether it gradually decreases and perhaps vanishes, or is even reversed " ; and he recommends co-operative studies in Britain. The present investigation represents a very small-scale contribution carried out by Vernon in England, and by O'Gorman and McLellan '95 * Sutherland (1951) has shown an average loss in scores on Moray House arithmetic tests of 2 to 3 points, a year after sitting the Scottish transfer examinat...

NOTE ON THE ARTICLE “DIFFERENCES IN TEST SCORES AND IN THE GAINING OF SELECTIVE PLACES FOR SCOTTISH CHILDREN AND THOSE IN ENGLAND AND WALES,” BY Douglas, Ross, Maxwell and Walker

“…This caution is perhapsdue to the fact that the authors kept their interpretation to the total T scores. Yet, if one examines individual test results some interesting conclusions emerge, conclusions which, in fact, are closely parallel to the findings of a previous investigation, based on much smaller numbers, by Vernon, O'Gorman and McLellan (1955).…”

“…"This caution is perhapsdue to the fact that the authors kept their interpretation to the total T scores. Yet, if one examines individual test results some interesting conclusions emerge, conclusions which, in fact, are closely parallel to the findings of a previous investigation, based on much smaller numbers, by Vernon, O'Gorman and McLellan (1955).In the National Survey of Health and Development analysis, the Scottish children were inferior to the English (here includes the Welsh) in non-verbal and verbal reasoning tests a t all ages, except in verbal reasoning at 15. These differences are repeated inside classes, except in one case (middle class 8-year-old children-no difference).…”