Cultural Capital and Students Beliefs about Instructional Quality

There are two main perspectives for understanding teaching effects in the sociological theory. First, the additive perspective understands teaching resources as additives, where instruction is a technological process that leads to achievement. Second, the interactive model proposes that instruction does not produce achievement per se. Instead, opportunities for learning interact with the effects of student characteristics. One of the possible ways in which quality and quantity of instruction could interact with students’ endowments is how they understand opportunities for learning, beliefs that may not be equally distributed across social classes. In this context, this study aims to understand students’ attributional beliefs about the quality of instruction, and how they interact with the cultural capital of students. By using a unique factorial survey, we identified causal attributional beliefs of instruction quality for a representative sample of Chilean primary school students. The findings indicate that students strongly believe that planning time and multidisciplinary team of professional affect teaching quality. Weak beliefs about class size and teachers' income satisfaction are found. In addition, the causal attribution of planning time increases with different measurements of students’ cultural capital. Results are discussed considering the contribution of cognitive sociology for studying heterogeneity of teaching effects.