Kelvin Teo
Learning mathematics
Someone once pointed out that good students don’t necessarily need quality teachers because they can manage on their own. It is the poorer students who fare more poorly in their studies that need quality teachers. He further added that if the good teachers continue to teach the good students and that poorer students are being taught by not-so-good teachers, the gap between the good and poor students will widen. What that someone said makes sense.
Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, pointed out objectively the difference between a good teacher and a bad one. Students of a bad teacher, Hanushek says, will only manage to learn half a year’s worth of material in one school year. Students of a very good teacher on the other hand will be able to pick up one-and-a-half year’s worth of material within a year.
Besides teaching factors, socio-economic factors play a role in the performance of students. Students from better-off families are able to afford extra preparation classes, tutorial classes, home tuition or outside school curriculum coaching lessons of any kind. And anxious parents from such well-off families are willing to pay for them. The impact of a bad teacher on such students is well buffered due to the extra coaching. The reasoning is that even if their bad school teacher only manages to impart half a year’s worth of material in one school year, the extra coaching will make up for the shortfall of materials to be covered within a year. Students from families of lower socio-economic status on the other hand are not usually able to afford the extra coaching lessons. If their luck of the draw deems that they are to be taught by a bad teacher, obviously they will be adversely impacted by the bad teaching.
Other student-based factors affecting academic performance are intelligence and motivation. Student motivation is associated with the amount of effort he puts in his studies. A highly motivated one will be more motivated to put in more effort in his studies. And it is true that effort put in or hard work will have a bearing on academic performance. As for intelligence, a public statement by academic researchers on the topic otherwise known as the Mainstream Science on Intelligence describes intelligence as a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. The statement of course went on to qualify intelligence as something more than book learning and test-taking smarts, both of which are considered narrow academic skills. However, if we control for other factors such as quality of teachers and level of student motivation, it is reasonable to conclude that a more intelligent student will perform better than his average counterpart due to superior reasoning, planning, problem solving, abstract thinking and complex idea comprehension abilities.
For education systems that have streaming practices, the attributes possessed by students at the top end will include high motivation, intelligence, a conducive learning environment at home and last but not least, extra coaching for the well-off ones. There is also a relationship between environment and intelligence, and factors such as “freedom to engage in verbal expression, language teaching and parental involvement” could affect scores in IQ tests.
The question is how can we help the poorer students to raise their standards of learning? In almost every society, students who usually fare poorly invariably have the following attributes – firstly, studying at public-funded, public or neighbourhood schools and secondly, they usually hail from families of lower socio-economic status, which means they cannot afford extra coaching that will boost their academic performance. One obvious solution will be to mobilise quality teachers to teach such students. This mobilisation cannot penalise the pockets of households footing the school fees of students who fare poorly, and thus, it requires the intervention of the government.
In terms of the government’s role in the mobilisation of personnel, we need not look further than the Australian healthcare system, of all places. The issue in Australian healthcare is the asymmetric distribution of healthcare personnel and resources. Most of healthcare practices are concentrated in the coastal part of Australia, particularly the east coast, whereas the central part of Australia populated by rural communities face a dearth of healthcare personnel. To this end, the Australian government came up with rural scholarships for medical students that provided them with generous stipends in return for a bond to serve the rural community. To make the terms even more attractive, the more rural the area that the graduate chooses to serve in, the shorter the period of the bond.
The same “carrot dangling” approach adopted by the Australian government to encourage medical personnel to serve in rural areas of need can be adopted in education systems. Governments can look into creating incentive schemes to attract the best teaching talents to teach in “areas of need”, i.e. public or neighbourhood schools with a high concentration of students who fare poorly. Good teachers can be identified, and given a firm opportunity to teach such students with offer of incentives such as generous stipends, opportunities to pursue generously funded postgraduate studies, improved chances of teaching career progression, etc.
After all, it is the students who fare poorly whom are in need of quality teachers. Of course, some may point out that teaching is a noble profession and education of those who fare poorly is the altruistic goal of a teacher. Idealistically, it should be that way, but we also have to be realistic about the challenges of teaching students who fare poorly, in the form of extra hours dedicated to lesson preparation, extra remedial classes catered for the weaker ones. Such incentives are just reward for those who are willing to step forward to improve the quality of learning among students who fare poorly.
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Photo courtesy of pearlsofjannah, Flickr Commons
