Research abstracts for People

The New Meaning of Educational Change

M. Fullan (1991), London: Cassell

Research points to the importance of staff development being school-based. It should be focused on providing assistance to improve classroom teaching and the course being taught, and it should be ongoing and build on what has been done before. Staff development should also be embedded within overall school planning, and ideas from development activities should be routinely shared. A number of studies show that one-off presentations by outside experts can be counterproductive.

The Learning School

G. Southworth (1994), Chapter 5 in P. Ribbens and E. Burridge (eds) Improving Education: Promoting Quality in Schools, London: Cassell

Excellent schools are learning organisations, with teachers and senior managers continuing to be learners, keeping up to date with their subjects and with advances in understanding about effective practice. Learning has most effect when it takes place at the school itself or is school-wide, rather than specific to individual teachers. The need for schools to become learning organisations is increasingly important given the pace of societal and educational change. In a learning school there is a need for learning at five interrelated levels – children’s, teacher, staff, organisational, and leadership learning

Student Achievement through Staff Development

B. Joyce and B. Showers (1995), New York: Longman

The research evidence suggests that skill acquisition and the ability to transfer to a range of situations requires ‘on-the- job- support’. This implies changes to the workplace and the way in which we organise staff development in schools. In particular it means the opportunity for immediate and sustained practice, collaboration and peer coaching and a focus on development and implementation.

The major components of training are: presentation of theory or description of skill or strategy, modelling or demonstration of skills or models of teaching, practice in simulated settings, structured and open-ended feedback, coaching for application.

Planned Educational Change in Japan: The case of Elementary Science Instruction

C. Lewis and I. Tuschida (1997), Journal of Educational Policy 12 (5), 313-31

Teachers regularly present ‘research lessons’ to colleagues, in which they demonstrate some innovative practice in the subject they are teaching. Colleagues and the teacher will then discuss the lesson. Usually the whole faculty is invited to attend. Some schools are designated ‘research schools’ and will present lessons to teachers in the area or in some cases nationally.

Eighth Grade Mathematics and Science Benchmarking Report: Executive Summary

TIMSS 1999

Improving teacher quality depends on providing opportunities for professional development. Across the Benchmarking participants, there was considerable variation in the type of professional development that teachers engaged in. For example, there were only a few examples in which mathematics teachers reported both observing and being observed by other teachers. In many cases half or more of the teachers reported that their professional development activities emphasized curriculum, but only about one-quarter of teachers reported that their professional development activities emphasized content knowledge.

Using Learning Environment Assessments to Improve Classroom and School Climates

B J Fraser (1999), in H J Frieberg (ed) School Climate: Measuring, Improving and Sustaining Healthy Learning Environments, Falmer Press

A classroom or school’s climate or environment not only is important in its own right, but can also influence student achievement and attitudes. The research suggests that achievement can be enhanced by changing the actual classroom environment in ways that make it more congruent with the environment preferred by the class.

Teachers have a more positive perception of the climate in their classrooms than their pupils. Therefore, getting information from pupils is important. Involving pupils by getting them to give feedback on classroom climate will also help to make pupils feel valued and important and can therefore contribute to school and classroom climate in turn.

How to Improve Your School

J Ruddock and J Flutter (2003), Continuum

One of the elements that can lead to disaffection is the feeling among pupils that they don’t have a ‘voice’ in the school. The contrast then between school and society, where they have increasing choice and freedom, results in frustration.

Involving pupils in the work and leadership of the school has been found to be an effective way of empowering young people and combating disaffection. Pupils can become ‘pupil leaders’ who, as well as taking responsibility for their own learning, are actively playing a role in the running of their schools. This needs to be more than merely symbolic, and encompass consultation on important as well as trivial decision making.

Freedom’s Orphans: Raising Youth in a Changing World

J Margo and M Dixon (2006), Institute of Public Policy Research

In just over a decade, personal and social skills have become 33 times more important in determining relative life chances. For a significant proportion of those born in 1970, social immobility - the passing on of disadvantage through families - was clearly due to the connection between family background and personal and social skills. At the same time, young people from less affluent backgrounds became less likely than their more fortunate peers to develop these skills.

Teaching Pro-Social Skills to Young Children to Increase Emotionally Intelligent Behaviour

K Kolb and S Weede (2001) , Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA.

There is increasing evidence that approaches that combine direct instruction on social skills with collaborative group work are effective in developing pupils’ social skills. Researchers have found that the group work in which the skills were practised was important but that direct coaching was also needed to change pupil behaviour. Direct instruction of skills such as listening, keeping hands to oneself, being courteous, encouraging others, and their implementation through collaborative group practices was effective in developing these skills. Other skills developed through cooperative learning included compromising, accepting differences, staying with the group and using encouraging words. The post intervention data indicated that pupils demonstrated an increase in pro-social behaviour and emotional intelligence, and that learned social skills transferred across the curriculum.

School factors related to Quality and Equity

PISA 2000, OECD

Some factors are more readily controlled by policy makers, school managers and teachers. What impact do school characteristics that are more easily amenable to policy have on student performance? PISA allows a classification of policy-amenable school characteristics into three main categories:

School resources - this includes material and physical resources such as the quality of a school’s physical infrastructure and school size, as well as human resources such as the proportion of teaching staff with a tertiary qualification and the number of teachers within the school compared to the number of students.

School climate - this covers different aspects of a school’s culture, including the disciplinary climate, how well students and teachers get along, how strongly students identify with their school and how motivated and committed the school’s teachers are.

School policies - this includes the level of autonomy a school enjoys in decision making, and various accountability issues such as whether or not the school conducts self-evaluations and monitors student progress and whether or not the school communicates student performance information to parents or the local authorities.

Student characteristics, school context and school climate, policies and resources explain “three quarters” of the differences in school performance. School climate has more impact than school resources or school policies. School climate, policies and resources together explain 6 per cent of the performance differences between schools, but this varies greatly across countries. Of the three, school climate has the greater impact.

The lesser impact of school factors that are more easily amenable to policy does not make them any less important. The results indicate several potential policy levers to improve school performance - improved disciplinary climate and student-related factors affecting the school climate, and a strong sense of belonging at school. A sense of belonging has a relatively strong impact on the performance of students in education systems where they are selected for particular institutions or educational programmes.

In many cases school climate is heavily influenced by the school composition. However, this is also sometimes the case for school resources and school policies. These are areas over which schools and educational systems have more control and efforts could be made to ensure a more equal distribution among schools. This could be seen as specifically relevant for schools with a comparatively disadvantaged student population.

Research abstracts for other areas

Learning and Teaching

Vision and Leadership

Partnership

Culture and Ethos

Further research

Explore Learning and Teaching Scotland's Research Round-Up.