Seeking help is harder for some children

Middle-class children ask their teachers for help more often and more assertively than do working-class children and therefore receive more support and assistance from teachers, a new study in the American Sociological Review finds. Middle-class children come to school better equipped to interact with their teachers, which also gives them an advantage over poorer students.

The study by University of Pennsylvania researcher Jessica McCrory Calarco tracked requests for help across different subjects and assignments made by students in grades 3 to 5 in an unidentified midsized, suburban elementary school over a six-month per- iod. Middle-class children were defined as having at least one parent with a four-year college degree and at least one parent in a professional or managerial occupation, while working-class children had parents who worked in blue-collar or service jobs and did not have college degrees.

McCrory Calarco found that the average middle-class student makes seven requests for help from teachers to every one request made by a working-class student.

Middle-class children will call out or approach teachers directly, even interrupting, to make their needs known. Working-class children, on the other hand, are less apt to ask for help and usually try to deal with problems on their own. When working-class children do ask for help, they tend to do so in less obvious ways. For example, they might sit with their hand raised. Consequently, they often wait longer for teachers to notice them and respond.

In interviews with the children, McCrory Calarco found that middle-class children were strategic in the way they asked for help. They described how they monitored the teacher’s movements and readied themselves for when the teacher looked their way. By comparison, working-class children expressed concern about upsetting their teacher with too many requests and were less specific about how they handled themselves when they had a question.

This difference in help-seeking patterns between middle-class and working-class kids was consistent across grades and teaching styles, although requests for help across the board became more frequent as children moved from 3rd to 5th grade. Males and females did not vary much in their help-seeking skills, but higher-achieving and more outgoing students requested help a bit more often than did lower-achieving and less outgoing children.