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Higher Education

Sociology: A Canadian Perspective, Third Edition — Chapter 14

Instructions: For each question, click on the radio button beside your answer. When you have completed the entire quiz, click the 'Submit my answers' button at the bottom of the page to receive your results.

Question 1:


a) Over 70 per cent of the population now holds post-secondary credentials.
b) In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, relatively few occupations required educational credentials.
c) As credentials became more important for many jobs, people were more likely to extend their schooling into and beyond the high school years.
d) The baby boom that occurred after World War II resulted in unprecedented sizes of cohorts of children who were entering and moving through the school system.
e) Today, most Canadian children attend compulsory kindergarten, sometimes beginning preschool or early childhood education programs as early as two years of age, continuing their studies well past high school.

Question 2:


a) informal learning
b) knowledge-based economy
c) globalization
d) adult education
e) income

Question 3:


a) integrated schools foster a sense of pride by helping to build strong personal, social and cultural identities
b) black-focused schools can address high dropout and failure rates and related social problems such as violence, unemployment, and drug abuse among inner-city black youth
c) the more education one has, the higher chances of having a job, a better income, and good health status
d) education is a marketplace in which parents should ‘shop’ for the kinds of education best suited to their children’s needs
e) private schools, voucher programs, home schooling allow schools to become more responsive and accountable to the varied interests of educational consumers

Question 4:


a) As society becomes more complex and specialized, educational institutions take on many of the functions previously managed by families, communities, and religious organizations to ensure that successive generations are able to make a seamless transition f
b) Schools cultivate characteristics essential for contemporary work and public life by reinforcing essential norms of independence, achievement, universalism, and specificity.
c) Technical functionalism links educational growth to the increasing technical sophistication of jobs and knowledge production.
d) There are persistent inequalities in educational opportunities, outcomes, and benefits.
e) Education is meritocratic because it enables people to gain opportunities for social or economic success regardless of their social backgrounds.

Question 5:


a) Durkheim
b) Parsons
c) Woods
d) Becker
e) Heckman and Krueger

Question 6:


a) Functionalist
b) Human capital
c) Symbolic interactionist
d) Ethnomethodology
e) Conflict

Question 7:


a) teachers’ backgrounds influence their construction of images of the ideal pupil, which in turn affect how they treat and assess students
b) schools are a series of negotiations among teachers, students, and parents
c) classrooms tend to resemble one another not so much because of a given model of schooling but more likely because people act in accordance with images about what is expected of them
d) classroom dynamics cannot be understood fully without reference to educational policy, power structures, social change, and persistent social inequalities that strongly influence educational processes and outcomes
e) all of the above

Question 8:


a) Marx
b) Parsons
c) Becker
d) Bowles and Gintis
e) Heckman and Krueger

Question 9:


a) Professions control access to education and certification as a way of preserving the status and benefits attached to their occupations.
b) Credential inflation occurs as occupations preserve special privileges by simultaneously claiming the need for superior qualifications and restricting entry into these kinds of jobs.
c) In post-secondary education, increased government funding has led to affordable tuition rates, which makes it easier for students without sufficient resources to attend colleges and universities.
d) Schools may function more as warehouses for delaying people’s entrance into the labour force and for dissipating their dissatisfaction with the economy’s failure to provide a sufficient number of satisfying jobs than as places where effective learning and
e) Capitalism has contributed less to skills upgrading through technological advancement than to processes that erode working skills, degrade workers, and marginalize youth.

Question 10:


a) School boards lack policies, enforced through human rights legislation, to restrict sexist curricula and to prohibit gender-based discrimination in educational programs and institutions.
b) The educational participation rates of and attainment by females have come to exceed those for males.
c) Female students remain highly underrepresented in important fields such as information technologies, engineering, and some natural sciences.
d) Female teachers predominate in the primary grade.
e) Men tend to be overrepresented in the upper grades and in post-secondary teaching positions, especially in the most senior teaching and educational administrative positions.

Question 11:


a) how anti-racism education stresses the ways in which domination builds on notions of racial difference to create fundamental inequalities among groups that are defined on the basis of biological differences or cultural variations
b) that education contributes to the transmission of power and privilege from one generation to another as it employs assumptions and procedures that advantage some groups and disadvantage others
c) that holding varying degrees of economic, social, and cultural resources guarantees that these resources will be converted automatically into educational advantage
d) competition for educational access and credentials decreases as different groups look to education to provide a gateway into important occupational and decision-making positions
e) all of the above

Question 12:


a) a formal curriculum
b) a hidden curriculum
c) credentialism
d) a banking model of pedagogy
e) increasing diversity

Question 13:


a) practices that prevent educational participants from raising concerns that are important to them, as well as to indirect processes that make students question their own cultural backgrounds
b) educational practice in which material is pre-packaged and transmitted in a one-way direction from the educator to the student
c) leaving students from alternative backgrounds with a sense that their experiences, questions, and capacities are invalid or irrelevant
d) the unwritten purposes or goals of school life
e) the lack of girls and Aboriginals in post-secondary education

Question 14:


a) Sweden
b) Japan
c) Canada
d) the United States
e) India

Question 15:


a) Conservatives
b) Neo-liberals
c) Functionalists
d) Critical theorists
e) Human capital theorists

Question 16:


a) learners
b) teachers
c) educational administrators
d) parents
e) A, B, and C

Question 17:


a) Gaps are narrowing significantly between those who have access to computers and reliable electronic connections—and the skills and know-how to use and take advantage of new technologies—and those who do not.
b) Regular access to computers and mobile technology, along with the ability to use them productively depends on such factors as income and education levels, gender, area of residence and work, social class, and racial characteristics.
c) Web access and new technologies have enabled schools and learners in remote regions to gain access to varied learning resources and opportunities in both accredited and special education programs.
d) The ‘digital divide’ distinguishes richer, more technologically-developed nations from developing nations.
e) Information technologies contribute to important educational innovation, and may provide greater employment and economic opportunities outside of school.

Question 18:


a) Girls have begun to outperform boys on a number of indicators, especially in areas like reading.
b) In many provinces there are pronounced gender differences in many dimensions of mathematics and science performance.
c) Women outnumber men in post-secondary enrolment and graduation, but there are strong gender differences in fields of study and types of training programs.
d) Women are much more heavily concentrated in a few fields, such as education, nursing, and social work or social services.
e) Men tend to outnumber women considerably in areas such as engineering and electrical technologies, computer science, and primary industries.

Question 19:


a) emphasized the recruitment of immigrants with high educational credentials
b) made Canada less dependent on immigrants from Western Europe and the United States
c) contributed to a growing proportion of highly educated or professionally qualified visible-minority immigrants who place a high value on their children’s educational advancement
d) increased sensitivity to the impact of racial discrimination and other mechanisms that historically have excluded or discouraged racial minority students from advancing through the Canadian education system
e) all of the above

Question 20:


a) there is very little discriminatory treatment in provincial schools
b) Aboriginal people’s overall education levels are well below national levels
c) there has been continuous increases in the levels of educational achievement, so that by 2006, Aboriginal people aged 25 to 44 years were almost as likely to have a post-secondary degree or diploma
d) the damaging legacy of residential schools has been virtually erased by the Canadian government’s efforts in the last ten years, providing significant financial assistance to Aboriginal families so that they can afford to send their children to good schoo
e) all of the above