INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1. RESEARCHING THE OUTCOMES OF THE BENDIGO EDUCATION PLAN
1.1 CHANGING SCHOOL SETTINGS
1.2 TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL LEARNING
CHAPTER 2. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH ON PERSONALIZING LEARNING AND WELLBEING
2.1 CHALLENGES IN RESEARCHING ATTEMPTS
2.2 CONSTRUCTING THE SURVEY INSTRUMENT CONCLUSION LIST OF USED LITERATURE
LIST OF USED LITERATURE
SUPPLEMENT
INTRODUCTION
Educators are concerned about how to imagine and enact successful secondary education. This is partly due to broad recognition that education systems play a key role in enabling or constraining individual, subgroup, and national capabilities. Their aim is to identify and analyze the outcomes of an ambitious, large-scale approach to address these curricular demands and challenges.
This research also included a comparative study of two like regional schools in Australia with similar socio-economic profiles to the schools in Bendigo, but where students learnt predominantly in traditional classroom settings.
It is timely in providing new knowledge about enablers and constraints to achieve effective student learning and wellbeing in these settings.
Thus, the study is a complex story of considerable teacher and student experimentation over time with new blended approaches under various constraints and opportunities. They track attempts in these schools to develop effective, diverse practices in open-plan settings where students were expected to engage meaningfully in large groups, smaller subgroups and as individuals.
In this book the author focuses particularly on teacher and student adaptation to the idea of an up-scaled learning community in a setting that includes an open plan layout. While all the curricular initiatives posed challenges and demands for teachers and students, and influenced outcomes, the new settings were a significant catalyst to prompt and support teacher change in beliefs and practices. Teachers were compelled to consider how to optimize their potential to enhance student learning, while at the same time minimizing potential obstacles or difficulties created by these new spaces. These included teacher and student resistance to change, increased noise levels, student distraction, and lack of a history of proven practices.
CHAPTER I. RESEARCHING THE OUTCOMES OF THE BENDIGO EDUCATION PLAN
1.1 CHANGING SCHOOL SETTINGS
For many reasons educators are increasingly concerned about how to imagine and enact successful secondary education. This is partly due to broad recognition that education systems play a key role in enabling or constraining individual, subgroup, and national capabilities. Another contributor to this concern is the rise of comparative accounts of educational success within and between nations in high stakes subjects, such as science and mathematics, leading to calls for new approaches for under-performing cohorts. At the same time, multiple uncertainties and contested views about what knowledge, skills, and values might count as evidence of success now, and in the future, influence curricular prescriptions. This is evident in debates about appropriate topics and sequences in national curriculum documents on compulsory subjects, such as mathematics and literacy.
Research over the last thirty years has also amplified our sense of how much individual learners differ within and between ethnic and other subgroups, posing increasingly complex demands on curricular design for all students. Within the challenge of achieving equitable educational outcomes, improving regional students’ academic performance and wellbeing remains a concern for many education systems worldwide. As often noted, the health and career prospects of these students tend to remain inferior to their metropolitan counterparts, especially in the case of students of low socio-economic status (SES).
Education researchers also claim that systems and methods developed for a different century’s conditions and agendas now seem inadequate to address the new and complex needs of all students.
CHAPTER II. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH ON PERSONALIZING LEARNING AND WELLBEING
2.1 CHALLENGES IN RESEARCHING ATTEMPTS
This project aimed to evaluate attempts to personalize learning in six regional Australian schools with predominantly low SES students, including four schools with open-plan up-scaled learning communities. Achieving this aim posed significant interlocking conceptual and methodological challenges. The main conceptual challenge entailed characterizing what should count as personalized learning and wellbeing, and why. The main methodological problem was how to track and explain students’ perceptions of teaching and learning processes, and their academic and wellbeing outcomes on these questions over three years in these new settings, taking into account salient influences.
Past accounts of personalizing learning have raised many unresolved questions about its reputed novelty, rationale, goals, methods, and outcomes. Therefore, tracking possible effects on individual student perceptions and experiences of learning created further questions about which aspects of these experiences should be researched, and how. Teachers and students had varying understandings of what should count as student personalized learning, what enables or constrains the likelihood of personalized outcomes, and what practices teachers should undertake in the name of personalization.
Over the three years of our study, the project researchers developed and modified our own multi-dimensional account of how learning can be personalized and enacted in the context of up-scaled learning communities in these settings. They utilized mixed methods to enable analysis of broad patterns of student responses to surveys over the three years, case study research on subject areas, and principal, teacher and student practices and beliefs in varied contexts during this time.
CONCLUSION
The BEP’s prescriptions about how and why learning should be ‘personalized’ for all learners is at best sketchy, and understates the significant challenges for teachers in conceptualizing and enacting a robust curriculum to address this dimension of learning.
The BEP writers perceived a need for considerable professional learning for teachers. They proposed that effective implementation of this curriculum would depend on increased teacher effectiveness. The BEP claimed that expert teaching focuses primarily on disciplinary understanding, where students wrestle with profound ideas, use what they learn in meaningful ways, and on guiding students to organize, and make sense of what they learn and its connection to the wider world.
This work is reported on the development, validation and implementation of a survey, the Personalized Learning Experience Questionnaire (PLEQ), to monitor students’ perceptions of the extent to which their learning environment was personalized. It was one of the first instruments to establish, using structural equation modelling, the complex interaction among a wide range of factors that impact on personalization of learning, academic efficacy and student wellbeing. The PLEQ is significant in providing an instrument that enables a comprehensive evaluation by researchers and teachers of the learning environment in terms of monitoring personalized learning. Students’ responses to the scales enabled teachers and researchers to:
– reflect on current student perceptions of major contributing elements to a personalized, quality-learning environment;
– develop a shared language for interpreting results and appropriate responses;
– target possible pedagogical interventions to one or more scales to alter students’ perceptions of how personalized they find this environment;
– track and evaluate the effect of interventions on student perceptions of the scales;
– gain a greater shared understanding of the complexity of scale interactions;
– monitor the long-term learning effects of ongoing pedagogical interventions.
The emergent model indicates that there are no quick fixes, and that many of the scales interact to influence student perceptions. It was also reported on and analyzed quantitative data on student attendance, wellbeing, and academic performance in English and mathematics over the three years of the study. These results indicate the continuing challenges around influencing student attendance and also highlight the academic gains during this time.
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