ANYONE FOR TENNIS - SOCIAL-CLASS DIFFERENCES IN CHILDRENS RESPONSES TO NATIONAL CURRICULUM MATHEMATICS TESTING

Mathematics is a central part of the school curriculum. Alongside stud ies in the dominant language of a society, success and failure in the discipline play an important role in the distribution of opportunities to children and young people. Until fairly recently, in England and e lsewhere, success in primary school mathematics was achieved by demons trating a capacity to memorise, reproduce and use relatively simple al gorithms. However, in recent years, there has been considerable change in primary school mathematics with an increasing stress being laid, a t least rhetorically, on understanding, investigation and the applicat ion of mathematics in 'realistic' settings. It seems likely that such changes, in so far as they affect the form and content of National Cur riculum assessment, will produce changes in who succeeds and who fails , ie in selective processes within schooling. The paper draws on preli minary results from an ESRC project which is examining National Curric ulum assessment in mathematics for 10-11 and 13-14 year-old children i n relation to class, gender and 'ability'.The paper examines the ways in which children from different sociocultural backgrounds approach as sessment items which embed mathematics in supposedly 'realistic' conte xts. Early data from the Key Stage 2 sample of 10-11 year olds will be presented which shows that there does seem be a social class effect i n the response of children to 'realistic' items - one which leads to s ome working class children failing to demonstrate competences they hav e. The paper uses quantitative and qualitative methods, relating its f indings to Basil Bernstein's account of sociocultural codes in particu lar his theorising of the social distribution of recognition and reali sation rules for reading educational contexts - and to Bourdieu's theo rising of habitus.