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Program
In this seminar, taking place on November 16th, 15:00–16:00 CET, Wim van de Grift will be presenting: Effects of coaching elementary school teachers in their zone of proximal development.
Abstract:
PIRLS and TIMSS studies show that the performance of Dutch 9-year-olds in reading, math and science has declined with respectively 27, 11 and 12% of a standard deviation in recent years. Literature review shows that if we want to do something about the declining performance of Dutch students, teachers should grow in teaching skill by about half a standard deviation.
Using the ICALT observation tool, we observed 384 elementary school teachers. Observers are trained during half a day with the help of two video tapes. Observers who are responsible for too much insufficient mutual consistency (ICC <.70), too much disagreement about sufficient/insufficient (Cohen’s κ <.50) or who’s scores differ too much from other observers (Cohen’s δ >.20) are not invited to participate in this study.
The ICALT observation instrument is made up of teaching skills (items) that previous research had shown to be linked with student achievement. The ICALT observation instrument fulfils the assumptions of the Rasch model: the scale is unidimensional; the items of the scale are local stochastically independent; and the item characteristic curves are parallel. Since the items of a Rasch scale have a hierarchical order, a Rasch observation scale can be used in most of the cases (Meijer’s PF<.30=90.1%) to determine a teacher's zone of proximal development (ZPD).
The average elementary school teacher masters the basic teaching skills, is activating his students and finds his zone of proximal development in differentiating instruction. However, 10.4% of the 384 teachers still have problems with the basic teaching skills. The teaching skill of teachers with 15-20 years of experience is almost a standard deviation better than that of the average newly graduated teacher. Teachers with more than 20 years of experience show a teaching skill of almost half a standard deviation lower than with teachers of 15-20years of experience.
195 teachers were coached in their ZPD after observation with the ICALT observation instrument. They were found to grow half a standard deviation (.52) in their teaching skill in about six months. The amount of teachers in the sample of 195, who did not master the basic skills of teaching diminished from 11.8% to 5.1%. The percentage of 18.3 beginning teachers who did not master basic teaching skills went down to 9.9% six months after this coaching.
It seems worthwhile to investigate in follow up studies whether this growth in teaching skills puts an end to the 11-27% decline in student performance in basic skills.