Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemPromoting change in teacher practice through supported differentiation of instruction in mathematics( 2019)Differentiated instruction has been shown to be effective in improving student learning outcomes; however, the resulting work load can be difficult for teachers to manage. A teaching package known as the NRP (Number Resource Package) was created to support teachers to differentiate their instruction, and used effectively in two classrooms. The package allows teachers to identify their students’ current understanding using a diagnostic test and a Guttman Chart, and then provides appropriate material for the area in which students need further consolidation. It assists teachers to identify, and provide instruction for, several different knowledge levels within the one classroom. Use of the NRP in the two experimental classes was compared with five classes that did not use the NRP and continued to follow their school’s mathematics curriculum. This study involved a quasi-experimental approach, using qualitative and quantitative data. Involved were an experimental group (two teachers) and a control group (five teachers) and a total of 147 year 7 students. The research took place in a large school in western Melbourne, Australia. The qualitative data consisted of three surveys and provided information on the effectiveness of the components in the NRP. The quantitative data consisted of a pre- and a post-test completed by students in both the experimental and control groups. These tests were completed at the beginning and the end of a nine-week teaching cycle and the learning gains were determined for each student (i.e. the difference between the pre- and post-test). There was a statistically significant difference between the experimental group and the control group when these learning gains were analysed. The results demonstrated that students in the experimental group who were taught using the NRP showed greater improvement on the post-test when compared to students in the control group. It was noted that those students who performed ‘below’ the expected level and those students who performed ‘above’ the expected level showed the most improvement in the experimental group, when compared with the control group.
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ItemUsing teacher capacity to measure improvement in key elements of teachers’ mathematical pedagogical content knowledge( 2016)School systems world-wide are investing increasing resources in assessment of students. The challenge is to gain value for teachers from this process. This study examined how we can use a construct of teacher capacity to identify improvements in teachers’ knowledge of Mathematics, their knowledge of the curriculum, their understanding of student’s mathematical thinking, and their ability to design and implement effective mathematics instruction as a result of using online diagnostic assessments (SMART tests- Specific Mathematical Assessments that Reveal Thinking.) Two principal challenges were addressed in this study: the first concerns how to translate a theoretical construct of teacher capacity in ways that truly reflect the professionally informed judgement and disposition to act. The second challenge was to design and use measures that would show improvement of teacher capacity over time as a result of using SMART tests. This study used innovative approaches involving teacher self-reports that were supported by evidence derived from a content specific questionnaire, related to the four elements of teacher capacity identified previously. The research study was carried out in the researcher’s school. 14 teachers used SMART tests over the course of one semester. All teachers showed improvement in teacher capacity as a result of implementing SMART tests, however improved teacher capacity was most evident amongst accomplished and expert teachers. The use of SMART tests also had a direct impact on teacher planning and informed classroom instruction. The study concludes with recommendations for future research in schools and in pre-service teacher education, utilising online diagnostic assessments of students. This study provides insight into what teacher capacity means in an educational setting, and how leaders in schools can effectively measure and improve teacher capacity in a school setting.
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ItemThe positioning of the coach and the transformative agency of teachers: The problem of constituting joint meaning in an “underperforming” secondary mathematics department( 2013)The Victorian State Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) instituted a coaching program (2007-2010) to improve teaching in primary and secondary schools. The DEECD policy platform of school improvement through teacher-trained coaches saw the employment of Teaching and Learning Coaches (henceforth “coach”) employed from 2007 to support mathematics and science instruction. Eleven numeracy coaches were deployed across the western metropolitan region of Melbourne in 2008 and placed in schools that were identified as “underperforming” based on student performance data. This research focuses on two school sites in which a coach worked at each on a weekly rotational basis in an onsite professional development program to improve teaching practice using a sanctioned generic mathematics lesson structure. The coaching program in this study involved the teachers of mathematics, the appointment of school-based coaches from among them, and administrators in the targeted “underperforming” secondary schools, with the intention of changing the prima facie unproductive, culturally specific, mathematics teaching practices in those schools. This thesis examines how mathematics teachers in targeted “underperforming” schools reported how they were influenced, by working with a coach. The research is founded on the theoretical belief that there is nothing else to social life but symbolic exchanges and the joint construction and management of meaning, including the meaning of bits of stuff including things we control and things that we don’t, but are expected to use to “remake” ourselves. To become relevant in the teachers’ life spaces the coaching stuff, including the coach herself, had to be interpreted to play a part in a human narrative. Interpretations require grammars that are historically and culturally local. The thesis presents fine-grained descriptive analyses of the semiotic interactions and the psychological positioning of mathematics teachers in the accounts of their experiences of the coaching program. The recommended practices put by the coach were resisted where they were seen not to serve the teachers’ personal identity formation in the local moral order of their school. The teachers’ social activity with the coach shows they live in a double social order. One component consists of the social arrangements for maintaining their teaching lives in their teaching environment, which was difficult by virtue of the educational disadvantage of the community, they served and their own poor training and professional isolation. This is the practical order and the teachers had their local proper place in that order. The other component consisted of the social arrangements for creating honour and status. This is an expressive order. The material world of privileged strategies, tactics, student test performance data and other elements of the program of improvement brought by the coach can be understood in their full human significance only if their roles in both these orders are identified. As to the teachers’ social motivation around these material things, the accounts of the teachers present a strong case for the priority of the expressive over the practical in their social action. The new lesson structure the coach introduced can become a social object only within the dynamic frame of the teachers’ storylines. It is this most ephemeral and “invisible” product of the teachers’ action that is really real, the narratives that are realized in the social orders in their school. The elaboration of a more comprehensive theory of mentoring / coaching practices based on this approach to constructing a new constitutive order involves a study of the social objects as created in and through constitutive practices. This draws on a distinction between constitutive orders of the rules of maths teaching, which are prospective doings, and sayings constructed around social objects, and institutional orders of maths teaching, which are retrospective and depend on “accounts” and justifications. It is essential that constitutive orders of practice are collaborations. Taking all this into account requires thinking of meaning making as one of communication or interaction, or as Harré argues, taking conversation as real or causal. To make sense of, or claim meaning in, the teachers’ constitutively ordered conversational sequences about their interactions with the coach, in the use of social objects, their self organising practices or language games, is to explore their orientation to a constitutive rule and their exhibition of it to others.
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ItemDo New South Wales Catholic schools deliver equitable education for senior school students?( 2012)This thesis investigates the equity of provision and access to senior school curriculum in New South Wales (NSW) Catholic schools. Via a quantitative and survey investigation into student enrolment, enrolment trends, engagement, outcomes, transition, satisfaction and access, the thesis draws conclusions as to the equity of the provision to senior students (post-compulsory) in NSW Catholic schools. The thesis concentrates in particular on Higher School Certificate English, mathematics, science and Vocational Education and Training. The research relies in part on quantitative data for senior student (N=23,221) participation and outcomes in the NSW Catholic sector linked to social demographic data as contained in the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census collection district data. The multi-method quantitative research approach also includes the analysis of survey data collected through phone and email surveys of students (N=1,566), parents and carers (N=647) and teachers (N=1,184). The research finds that students from low SES backgrounds are disadvantaged on all measures. The thesis analyses the restraints that impact on NSW Catholic schools preventing them catering better for those of greatest need of their service. The research recommends that these restraints be challenged to better serve the poor as is the mission of Catholic schools. It challenges NSW Catholic schools to be more audacious in the manner in which they approach the delivery of the senior school experience.