In article <[log in to unmask]>, Peter Cuthbert
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>Dear Colleagues
>
>I was recently surprised to overhear some 'suits' in the organisation
>talking about the 'unwillingness of academic staff to take
>responsibility for student performance'(failure?).
>
>I had always been of the belief that student performance was only
>related in a very small way to what colleagues and I do in the clasroom,
>and things like personal effort were the major affective variables.
>Does anybody know of any literature reporting investigations of this
>issue?
>
Apparently a James M Coleman did some work on this in the USA in the
60s/70s, according to a contributor, David Lloyd Jones, to a current
'sci.edu' Newsgroup discussion.
I mailed him straight away privately to ask for the full reference to
Coleman's work. He's given me some hints on how to find it - but if
anyone of you out there has it available, I'd like to have it, please!
Thought you might like to see what he said:
* Start of extract from 'sci.edu' Newsgroup *
---------------------------------------------
From: "David Lloyd-Jones" <[log in to unmask]>
Newsgroups: sci.edu,k12.ed.science,sci.chem
Subject: Re: New high school chemistry teacher needs help
C. Roaten <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I would like to ask if anyone has any good (simple?) experiments or
> demonstrations that I could do for my chemistry classes. I have
> looked through many chemistry books but they don't offer much.
Friend,
If you have the intelligence to understand that the standard texts don't
offer much, you are probably one of the very very few ready for True
Knowledge About Education. (You'll like this stuff, because it makes you
feel good if you get your jollies out of comparing yourself with the
human race at large.)
Here's the deal:
James M. Coleman, one of the cleanest and best minds, was twice, in
1967-68 and in 1971-2, given the chance to look at American education.
He did a revolutionary thing: he said instead of looking at the teachers
evaluating themselves or their students, let's look at the students.
Wow!
He said let's look at what the inputs are and what the outcomes are for
students; let's normalise it statistically for student IQ and parents'
income, since we know that these are self-predicting, highly collateral,
and strong enough to be confounding.
Given that the bias of reality is to find that smart kids from rich
homes do well, and make their teachers look smart, Coleman could only do
one (or two or three) things: broaden his samples, get smarter
statistically, and shout back at authorities who knew what the ansers
were.
Somewhere in there Hewlett Packard came out with an RPN calculator that
also did big time funny regression stuff. It became known as the Coleman
button.
Here are the results: (the question being, normalized, what counts?)
lumens of light on the desktop: no, none;
teacher preparation time: nope, try again;
teachers' credentials or certifications: nope, zip;
age of schoolbooks in the school: no effect;
number of schoolbooks per student; no;
etc . .
Well, then, what counts?
Coleman found that, by an index made up of student results dated five
years later, student success was collateral with only one thing subject
to school-system manipulation (i.e.: other than parent wealth or student
IQ), namely:
* teacher vocabulary as identifiable by any off-the-cuff test like
the Readers Digest "It Pays To Improve Your Word Power" feature.
(Quick: what's a caduseus?)
Smart teachers help kids to be smart. Duh!
The question, then, is how to get smart people to be teachers. I'm a
nasty fearless person, so I have suggested that if the US Federal
government cut its science spending, that would free up a lot of bright
people to compete for teaching slots. The kicker is, if they went into
teaching, their un-subsidized students might do more science than they
would have been paid to do in the earlier place. :-)
-dlj.
* End of Newsgroup extract *
(I have filed the whole discussion - which goes off in many directions -
if anyone wants a copy - Bill C)
--
Bill Cranston, University of Paisley
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