Abstract
Welcome to the first issue of the AJE in 2019 which features contributions on a range of topics, including student attendance, teacher expectations, self-regulation skills and mathematical problem-solving.
The importance of instructional learning time for academic achievement has been emphasised since Carroll’s model of school learning (1963). In their article, David Lawrence, Vaille Dawson, Stephen Houghton, Ben Goodsell and Michael Sawyer analyse data from the 2013–2014 Australian Child and Adolescent Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing to examine the relationship between mental health disorders and school attendance. They find that one in seven students report having a mental health disorder. They further report that students with a mental health disorder – most frequently attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and anxiety – are absent more frequently than their peers without mental health disorders: An additional 3.5 days (Years 1–6), 12.5 days (Years 7–10) and 13.8 days (Years 11–12) on average per year.
School attendance is also the focus of an article by Lindy Baxter and Noel Meyers. Their study investigates the differences in attendance rates of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in a Victorian school experiencing disadvantage. While some measures such as a food program and employment of an Indigenous Worker show some positive effects on attendance from 2005 to 2015, the main obstacle to increasing school attendance for both groups of students is found to be poverty.
Teacher expectations continue to be a central point of discussion in education, as it is often thought that where teachers have higher expectations of student achievement, students will behave accordingly and actually perform at a higher level than where teachers have lower expectations. In this context, the literature review into teacher expectation research by Olivia Johnston, Helen Wildy and Jennifer Shand is enlightening. It illustrates that research continues to confirm links between the first step in the process – development of teacher expectations – and the last step in the process – student learning outcomes. However, the literature review shows that research reveals relatively little about the middle steps, namely how and why the expectations affect performance. It also demonstrates that research relatively rarely considers students’ views of these middle steps, such as students’ perceptions of teachers’ differential treatment depending on expectations and students’ reactions to these treatments.
In the next article, Susan-Marie Harding, Lorraine Graham, Patrick Griffin, Narelle English, Nives Nibali, BM Monjurul Alom and Zhonghua Zhang provide an insightful account of the conceptual underpinnings and design principles of an instrument to measure self-regulated learning as well as its cognitive piloting and psychometric testing using item response theory (IRT). Results of the study of more than 3000 students in Grades 5 to 8 using this instrument confirm that greater use of self-regulated learning is related to higher academic performance and that self-regulated learning appears to be used less frequently among older students than among younger students.
Self-regulation skills are also a focus of the article by Bree Wagner, Heather Carmichael Olson, Martyn Symons, Trevor Mazzucchelli, Tracy Jirikowic, Jane Latimer, Rochelle Watkins, Donna Cross, John Boulton, Edie Wright, Maureen Carter, Kaashifah Bruce, Sue Cherel and James Fitzpatrick who describe the pilot study of a program aimed at improving self-regulation and executive functioning in children. The study involved staff of a remote school in Western Australia being trained in the Alert Program®, which uses, among others, the analogy of a car engine for children to describe and move between different levels of alertness for different situations and tasks. School staff delivered the program in sessions of 60-minutes sessions over an eight-week period to 25 children in Years 1 to 5. While this pilot study is aimed mainly at developing processes and protocols and testing the instruments, a decrease in the frequency of children’s disruptive behaviours as rated by teachers and parents/caregivers indicates a potential improvement in children’s executive functioning and self-regulation.
The further understanding of factors related to mathematical problem-solving is of interest given that problem-solving as measured in some international assessments of student performance such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is declining in a number of countries, including Australia. In their article, Zeynep Çiğdem Özen and Aynur Gumus examine a path model of factors related to problem-solving in mathematics using data from 252 Year 7 students in Turkey. The investigated factors are mathematics anxiety, mathematics motivation, mathematics self-efficacy and metacognitive experience. Results indicate that, of these factors, only mathematics anxiety and metacognitive experience have a direct effect on mathematical problem-solving, while mathematics motivation and mathematics self-efficacy operate through other factors to have an effect on problem-solving.
As usual, with such a range of topics, our readers are bound to find something of interest in this issue.
Happy reading!