The DOI matches its Crossref record; 77 of the 77 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
“I Need Help!” Social Class and Children’s Help-Seeking in Elementary School
Abstract
What role do children play in education and stratification? Are they merely passive recipients of unequal opportunities that schools and parents create for them? Or do they actively shape their own opportunities? Through a longitudinal, ethnographic study of one socioeconomically diverse, public elementary school, I show that children’s social-class backgrounds affect when and how they seek help in the classroom. Compared to their working-class peers, middle-class children request more help from teachers and do so using different strategies. Rather than wait for assistance, they call out or approach teachers directly, even interrupting to make requests. In doing so, middle-class children receive more help from teachers, spend less time waiting, and are better able to complete assignments. By demonstrating these skills and strategies, middle-class children create their own advantages and contribute to inequalities in the classroom. These findings have implications for theories of cultural capital, stratification, and social reproduction.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
(2008) · Biostatistics and Microbiology: A Survival Manual · doi:10.1007/978-0-387-77282-0_6 · Cited by 17,371
Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education.
O'Shea, D. W., & Richardson, J. G. (1987) · Contemporary Sociology · doi:10.2307/2069964 · Cited by 15,142
Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology
Portes, A. (1998) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.1 · Cited by 12,037
Ways with Words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms
Heath, S. B. (1983) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511841057 · Cited by 5,009
Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms
Paffard, M., & Heath, S. B. (1984) · British Journal of Educational Studies · doi:10.2307/3121112 · Cited by 4,944
Socioeconomic Status and Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analytic Review of Research
Sirin, S. R. (2005) · Review of Educational Research · doi:10.3102/00346543075003417 · Cited by 4,687
Unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life
(2004) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.41-4975 · Cited by 4,619
Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality.
Oromaner, M., & Oakes, J. (1986) · Contemporary Sociology · doi:10.2307/2070941 · Cited by 3,424
Handbook of The Economics of Education
(2011) · Handbook of the Economics of Education · doi:10.1016/c2009-0-19772-6 · Cited by 2,525
Bernstein, B. B. (1971) · Cited by 2,299
Cited by
Campbell, J. L., Quincy, C., Osserman, J., & Pedersen, O. K. (2013) · Sociological Methods & Research · doi:10.1177/0049124113500475 · Cited by 2,974
Flexible Coding of In-depth Interviews: A Twenty-first-century Approach
Deterding, N. M., & Waters, M. C. (2021) · Sociological Methods & Research · doi:10.1177/0049124118799377 · Cited by 1,626
Stephens, N. M., Hamedani, M. G., & Destin, M. (2014) · Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/0956797613518349 · Cited by 708
Social Class Culture Cycles: How Three Gateway Contexts Shape Selves and Fuel Inequality
Stephens, N. M., Markus, H. R., & Phillips, L. T. (2014) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115143 · Cited by 539
The Unwritten Rules of Engagement: Social Class Differences in Undergraduates' Academic Strategies
Yee, A. (2016) · The Journal of Higher Education · doi:10.1080/00221546.2016.11780889 · Cited by 121
Metadata
- Authors
- Calarco, J. M.
- Venue
- American Sociological Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2011-11-04
- Volume
- 76
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 862-882
- ISSN
- 0003-1224 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-8271
- OpenAlex
- W2070491058
- Cited by
- 386
- References
- 77
- FWCI
- 35.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: “I Need Help!” Social Class and Children’s Help-Seeking in Elementary School. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0003122411427177
- The paper
- Calarco, J. M. (2011). “I Need Help!” Social Class and Children’s Help-Seeking in Elementary School. American Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122411427177
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
