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Background
Building on the Realistic Accuracy Model, this paper explores whether it is easier for teachers to assess the achievement of some students than others. Accordingly, we suggest that certain individual characteristics of students, such as extraversion, academic self-efficacy, and conscientiousness, may guide teachers' evaluations of student achievement, resulting in more appropriate judgements and a stronger alignment of assigned grades with students' actual achievement level (as measured using standardized tests).
Aims
We examine whether extraversion, academic self-efficacy, and conscientiousness moderate the relations between teacher-assigned grades and students' standardized test scores in mathematics.
Sample
This study uses a representative sample of N = 5,919 seventh-grade students in Germany (48.8% girls; mean age: M = 12.5, SD = 0.62) who participated in a national, large-scale assessment focusing on students' academic development.
Methods
We specified structural equation models to examine the inter-relations of teacher-assigned grades with students' standardized test scores in mathematics, Big Five personality traits, and academic self-efficacy, while controlling for students' socioeconomic status, gender, and age.
Results
The correlation between teacher-assigned grades and standardized test scores in mathematics was r = .40. Teacher-assigned grades more closely related to standardized test scores when students reported higher levels of conscientiousness (beta = .05, p = .002). Students' extraversion and academic self-efficacy did not moderate the relationship between teacher-assigned grades and standardized test scores.
Conclusions
Our findings indicate that students' conscientiousness is a personality trait that seems to be important when it comes to how closely mathematics teachers align their grades to standardized test scores.
We present the first systematic literature review on stress and burnout in K-12 teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a systematic literature search, we identified 17 studies that included 9,874 K-12 teachers from around the world. These studies showed some indication that burnout did increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were, however, almost no differences in the levels of stress and burnout experienced by K-12 teachers compared to individuals employed in other occupational fields. School principals' leadership styles emerged as an organizational characteristic that is highly relevant for K-12 teachers' levels of stress and burnout. Individual teacher characteristics associated with burnout were K-12 teachers' personality, self-efficacy in online teaching, and perceived vulnerability to COVID-19. In order to reduce stress, there was an indication that stress-management training in combination with training in technology use for teaching may be superior to stress-management training alone. Future research needs to adopt more longitudinal designs and examine the interplay between individual and organizational characteristics in the development of teacher stress and burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
Professional development on fostering students’ academic language proficiency across the curriculum
(2019)
This meta-analysis aggregates effects from 10 studies evaluating professional development interventions aimed at qualifying in-service teachers to support their students in mastering academic language skills while teaching their respective subject areas. The analysis of a subset of studies revealed a small non-significant weighted training effect on teachers' cognition (g' = 0.21, SE = 0.14). An effect aggregation including all studies (with 650 teachers) revealed a medium to large weighted overall effect on teachers' classroom practices (g' = 0.71, SE = 0.16). Methodological variables moderated the effect magnitude. Nevertheless, the results suggest professional development is beneficial for improving teachers' practice.
Teachers' attitudes toward inclusion are frequently cited as being an important predictor of how successfully a given inclusive school system is implemented. At the same time, beliefs about the nature of teaching and learning are discussed as a possible predictor of attitudes toward inclusion. However, more recent research emphasizes the need of considering implicit processes, such as automatic evaluations, when describing attitudes and beliefs. Previous evidence on the association of attitudes toward inclusion and beliefs about teaching and learning is solely based on explicit reports. Therefore, this study aims to examine the relationship between attitudes toward inclusion, beliefs about teaching and learning, and the subsequent automatic evaluations of pre-service teachers (N = 197). The results revealed differences between pre-service teachers' explicit attitudes/beliefs and their subsequent automatic evaluations. Differences in the relationship between attitudes toward inclusion and beliefs about teaching and learning occur when teachers focus either on explicit measures or automatic evaluations. These differences might be due to different facets of the same attitude object being represented. Relying solely on either explicit measures or automatic evaluations at the exclusion of the other might lead to erroneous assumptions about the relation of attitudes toward inclusion and beliefs about teaching and learning.
Example of best practice
(2021)
The Refugee Teachers Program, established at the University of Potsdam, Brandenburg, in 2016, represents a successful model for training and integrating individuals with foreign teaching qualifications through an 18-month teaching and language course. Initially created to help meet the demand for teachers in Germany, the Refugee Teachers Program has been further refined over the course of the last three years in the light of expert meetings, theoretical considerations, and negotiations with the Brandenburg Ministry of Education. This was the first program of its kind in Germany, following an influx of people being forced to migrate from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq in 2015. The program responded to these international events by providing training, work, and refuge for migrants who already had teaching experience in their home countries. More than 85 participants successfully completed the program and many have taken up newly created positions as teachers and pedagogical assistants in German schools. However, a number of hurdles still remain before most of the program's graduates can be granted full employment as teachers in Germany.
This mixed-method study addresses the need for a clear conceptualization of the professional reflection element of Lesson Study (LS), a popular collaborative approach to the professional development of teachers. Grounding and re-framing LS's post-lesson discussion in a theoretical framework of critical and collaborative reflection, we analyze the transcripts of four LS groups at German primary schools, focusing on depth of reflection and teachers' trajectories through their reflective practice. The findings show that LS groups differed significantly in the depth and the trajectories of their reflection processes. We consider implications for post-lesson discussions and critical reflection as a LS core skill.
Previous research has identified students' personality traits, especially conscientiousness, as highly relevant predictors of academic success. Less is known about the role of Big Five personality traits in students when it comes to teachers' decisions about students' educational trajectories and whether personality traits differentially affect these decisions by teachers in different grade levels. This study examines to what extent students' Big Five personality traits affect teacher decisions on grade retention, looking at two cohorts of 12,146 ninth-grade and 6002 seventh-grade students from the German National Educational Panel Study. In both grade levels, multilevel logistic mediation models show that students' conscientiousness indirectly predicts grade retention through the assignment of grades by teachers. In the ninth-grade sample, students' conscientiousness was additionally a direct predictor of retention, distinct from teacher-assigned grades. We discuss potential underlying mechanisms and explore whether teachers base their decisions on different indicators when retaining seventh-grade students or ninth-grade students.
Several studies have revealed that older students in a year group reach higher achievement scores than younger students in that group. But less is known about how students' relative age in class relates to their self-perception of academic achievement, their social acceptance in class and to how teachers judge their abilities. Therefore, we examined relative age effects within class on students' academic self-concept, peer relations, grades, and teachers' secondary school recommendation. Analyses were based on a sample of N = 18,956 German fourth graders, who had never been retained or accelerated. We applied multilevel regression to control for covariates at the individual and classroom level. There were no substantial relative age effects within class across any of the outcomes, except for a small advantage for the youngest in their reading self-concept. Our findings therefore contradict the common assumption that younger students in class are disadvantaged compared to their older classmates.
We present the first systematic literature review on stress and burnout in K−12 teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a systematic literature search, we identified 17 studies that included 9,874 K−12 teachers from around the world. These studies showed some indication that burnout did increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were, however, almost no differences in the levels of stress and burnout experienced by K−12 teachers compared to individuals employed in other occupational fields. School principals' leadership styles emerged as an organizational characteristic that is highly relevant for K−12 teachers' levels of stress and burnout. Individual teacher characteristics associated with burnout were K−12 teachers' personality, self-efficacy in online teaching, and perceived vulnerability to COVID-19. In order to reduce stress, there was an indication that stress-management training in combination with training in technology use for teaching may be superior to stress-management training alone. Future research needs to adopt more longitudinal designs and examine the interplay between individual and organizational characteristics in the development of teacher stress and burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
We present the first systematic literature review on stress and burnout in K−12 teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a systematic literature search, we identified 17 studies that included 9,874 K−12 teachers from around the world. These studies showed some indication that burnout did increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were, however, almost no differences in the levels of stress and burnout experienced by K−12 teachers compared to individuals employed in other occupational fields. School principals' leadership styles emerged as an organizational characteristic that is highly relevant for K−12 teachers' levels of stress and burnout. Individual teacher characteristics associated with burnout were K−12 teachers' personality, self-efficacy in online teaching, and perceived vulnerability to COVID-19. In order to reduce stress, there was an indication that stress-management training in combination with training in technology use for teaching may be superior to stress-management training alone. Future research needs to adopt more longitudinal designs and examine the interplay between individual and organizational characteristics in the development of teacher stress and burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.