Researchers wanted to investigate how quickly secondary school teachers form an opinion on a student's academic potential during an informal mentoring session. The researchers wanted to see whether teachers made an almost instant judgment (in under 2 minutes) about a student's potential, as suggested by previous educational research.
They collected data from 120 unstructured mentoring sessions where teachers interacted with new Year 7 students during a school transition day. The researchers asked the teachers to retrospectively estimate how long it took them, in minutes, to make their initial assessment of each student's academic potential.
The estimated time that it took the teachers to reach this judgment was split into four categories:
The teachers were fully informed about the aim of the study beforehand and gave their written consent for their data to be compiled and published.
Explain two ways that subjectivity could have influenced this mentoring decision-making study.
638 exam-style questions on Edexcel A Level Psychology Methods. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.