ENABLING LEARNING: DEALING WITH DIVERSITY
Engagement and Achievement of Ethnic Groups. Strand and Demie. English Language Acquisition and Educational Attainment at the End of Primary School
To investigate the impact of fluency in English on educational attainment after controlling for age, gender, special educational needs and entitlement to free school meals.
4 stages of fluency in English are compared, along with a variety of pupil 'background' measures.
Stages of fluency:
1. New to English.
2. Becoming familiar with English.
3. Become a confident user in English.
4. Fully fluent in English.
Pupil background measures:
Age
Gender
SEN
FSM
Ethnic group
Time spent in KS2 school
Prior attainment
There is a strong association between the stages of fluency and KS2 test scores.
Pupils not fully fluent do less well in English than English-only speakers. The association is less clear in Maths and Science.
Fully fluent pupils exceed the performance of English-only speakers on all tests.
The poor attainment related to low fluency scores remains even after the pupils' background measures controlled for.
Less fluent speakers (1 and 2) make less progress than English-only speakers, but fully fluent speakers make more progress than expected.
Educational attainment is not clearl linked to ethnic groups or other pupil measures, but there is a strong relationship between the stages of fluency in English and achievement.
Culture & Grouping
Learners are put into groups within educational settings for a wide range of reasons. They can be organised by age, ability, subject or gender group and each of these will have a rationale linked to improving the educational experience.
When sorted into age groups, this is to make the delivery of an age-related curriculum more efficient.
Gender groups have in the past been set up to enable different subjects to be covered and to address the issues related to the achievement of boys and girls.
Student grouping can also be organised to respond to the needs of different cultures within a teaching and learning environment.
Earlier findings suggested that fluency in English was a more important consideration than ethnicity.
If ethnic groups are taken into account, there is evidence to suggest that this can have a positive effect on achievement.
Ladson-Billings looked at the characteristics of excellent teachers in African-American schools and from this, suggested how other schools may adapt to maximise the success of ethnic groups.
She suggested schools need teachers to consider three principles:
1. Student need to experience academic success.
2. Teaching and learning should develop and continue to use culturally relevant ideas and skills.
3. Students need to be encouraged to challenge the 'social norms' tha tmaintain social inequalities.
If these are the characteristics of successful teachers, then if other colleagues adopt these they too will become excellent and their students will perform at a higher level.
There are outstanding and poorly performing students in all ethnic groups and it is fair to assume that good educational practice has a positive effect on learners.
One suggestion to improve the performance is to learn in smaller groups. Nye et al. report on the effect of teaching ethnic groups in a small class for the first 4 years of education. They were 13-17 instead of 22-26, and there were educational benefits that lasted for 5 years. Their focus was mainly on reading and maths, and they found that the largest positive effect was on reading. It is possible to suggest the smaller classes gave the teacher more time to concentrate on helping students with leanguage difficulties.
Aronson et al. attempted to reduce the discrimination experienced between ethnic groups by organising tasks that were to be completed by mixed ethnic groups. The overall task was broken down so each child had a responsibility and collaboration was needed if the task was to be completed. It has been successful in reducing discrimination in the short term, but results are not long lasting.
Role Models and Positive Support.
The DfES report on Ethnicity and Education discusses the findings of Aiming High: The African Caribbean Achievement Project, which endeavoured to raise the aspirations of African-Caribbean students by encouraging schools to develop whole-school approaches.
This ma have involved enhancing the students' outlook by taking them on trips to libraries, universities, or museums.
The school may have brought in consultants or run projects emphasising the options that may be available after leaving school.
They found that that when schools were commited to this positive approach and made clear to students the wide variety of possibilities available to them, then students and their parents became more positive.
Many educational settings have been seen to provide students with a limited outlook. This is also one of the findings of the report as they still found settings that did not provide such a positive outlook for students.
Mac an Ghaill found that one factor preventing higher acheivement was negative peer pressure and criticism.
The causes for the lower acheivement of some ethnic groups could be the lack of aspiration provided by schools and the fear of ridicule from peers.
Much research has shown the value of providing positive role models and like the Aiming High project these people are able to show others what may be possible.
There is a fear in education that the influence of negative role models can become too powerful and that students will prefer to make wrong or inappropriate choices.
Demie et al. reviewed the acheivement of African Heritage students and identified the good practice that led to them being successful.
Their findings regularly refer to the importance of role models. Teachers are seen as positive role models, especially in the early years, if they encourage good language and writing skills.
Gender Differences in Educational Acheivement.
Phase Gender difference
Pre-school Girls had better communication, social and cognitive skills and were more likely to wave goodbye. Girls were more likely to be read to. Boys improved their understanding of number more than use of literacy. There were no significant development differences.
Foundation Stage to KS3 Girls do better in English. Girls are slightly better at maths. The differences for science are very small.
KS4/GCSE Girls achieving 5+ A-Cs have outperformed boys since 1988, they have been 10 percentage points ahead since 1995 (in 2006, boys 54% and girls 64%)
Girls do better in humanities, arts and languages by 10 percentage points. There is a small (less than 5%) advantage for girls in maths and science.
A Level Girls out-perform boys in most subjects but the gaps is less than 3 percentage points. Interestingly, boys do better at home economics.
There was very little difference between males and females for any of the tests in the table below.
These differences are small and are unlikely to have any effect on the overall academic achievement of males or females. One significant difference that Strand et al. suggest that 'something other' than ability must be responsible for the differential success in examinations. The difficulties of course is to identify what this may be.
Cognitive ability
test (mean scores) Males Females
Verbal 2.2 points higher
Non-verbal 0.3 points higher
Quantitative reasoning 0.7 higher
The differences in acheivement between boys and girls are not as straightforward as was possibly first thought, as girls are not just cleverer than boys. It is also important not to focus on the apparent under-achievement of boys at the expense of supporting the learning of girls.
Differences in Brain Structure
One clear point has to be made early on regarding the difference in men's and women's brain structure, and that is that there are far more similarities than differences.between the male and female brains.
Solms and Turnbull emphasise the incredible similarity between the male and female brain and then summarise the few differences that have been reliably recorded. The most obvious difference is the average size of the brain, with men having larger brains than women. This is not just an effect of mean being larger than females: the male brain is larger in proportion to the rest of the bofy than the female brain.
The brain is vital to learning, it would seem logical to assume that a larger brain would be linked to increased intelligence or learning capacity.
The relationship between intelligence and brain size is fundamentally flawed. It would suggest men will have higher scores in cognitive tests than women, among other things. The link between brain size and intelligence can be dismissed.
The corpus callosum is proportionally larger in females than males. The means women have a more efficient link between the two hemispheres. There are two main advantages in having a greater connection between the hemispheres.
The first is the ability to score high in verbal cognitive tasks and to regularly out-perform males in language-based examinations. The second is that females are more empathic and aware of non-verbal social cues.
Strategies for Enabling the Learning of Boys and Girls. Younger et al. Raising Boys' Achievements.
Researchers identified schools that had been successful in raising the achievement of boys over a period of 5 years.
8 primary schools and 8 secondary schools were chosen as the originator schools.
Two schools were chosen as partner-schools where the strategies will be transfered to over 4 years.
The methods included:
Focus-group interviews with boys (and girls)
Individual semi-structured interviews with boys
Semi-structured interviews with teachers.
Visual methods, e.g. allowing primary school students to do photography.
Classroom observations.
Attitude surverys.
Questionnaires.
Analysis of pupil's writing.
Strategies that raise boy achievements also raise girl achievements.
The strategies for raising achievement were identified with four main approaches:
Pedagogic approaches (teaching literacy in primary schools only) included using interactive classroom activites, using speaking and listening to support writing and teachers being creative.
Individual approaches include setting realistic and challenging targets based on expectations and support provided by credible mentors.
Socio-cultural approaches include devloping initiatives to encourage team-building, encouraging paired reading to raise self esteem, and having staff who are commited to creating opportunities to give pupils space to articulate their feelings and emotions.
Whole-school approaches including single sex classrooms.
There was no conclusive evidence that putting boys and girls into seperate teaching groups had any impact on attainment.
Now i'm heading to bed. Night!
