The Importance of Teacher Quality - The Centre for Independent Studies
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The Importance of Teacher Quality

The quality of teaching is the single most important influence on students’ academic performance. When all other sources of variation in performance are taken into account – including socioeconomic background and differences between schools – the most important sources of variation in student achievement are at the classroom level. What happens in the classroom goes a long way towards explaining the much-publicised widening gap between the academic performances of boys and girls in Australia, especially in literacy achievement.

Boys are likely to be more inattentive than girls in class and as they tend to behave more disruptively, their learning is impeded. The impact of ineffective teaching is disproportionately greater for boys.

Changes to school curricula and assessment have also unintentionally favoured girls – by requiring higher levels of verbal and written communication skills – and overlooked boys’ natural capacities and interests. Ken Rowe cites the shift in emphasis from mathematics to numeracy as an example of this type of recent curricular alteration.

New South Wales’ 4-Unit Mathematics and Victoria’s Specialist Mathematics, for instance, requires students to demonstrate high levels of literacy as ‘in-context’ problems must be read and understood before they can be solved.

Boys are developmentally disadvantaged when facing classroom situations that require these communication skills. This has tended to favour girls because of their more developed socialisation and interaction communication skills.

Rowe warns against teachers ‘dumbing down’ the curriculum to meet the different needs of boys, and recommends strategies that teachers can employ to reduce boredom and engage boys in the classroom – such as highly structured lessons with an emphasis on challenge, frequent changes of activity, and short-term tasks and targets. The highest priority must be given to ongoing, evidence-based teacher training and professional development in order to enhance educational quality and student achievement.

Dr Kenneth J. Rowe is Principal Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research. This paper is a version of an invited submission to the parliamentary Inquiry into the Education of Boys by Rowe and Rowe (2000a), and a subsequent invited address (Rowe 2000a). The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those held by the Australian Council for Educational Research or by The Centre for Independent Studies.

 

 

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