Information
covered in the presentation included; the
information source which was the (1) Progress
International Reading Literacy Studies (PIRLS), (2) the home-school
interaction, (3) comparing various countries to inform government on how their
students were doing, (4)does any of this information matter and finally (5) the thoughts of the various EU members
attending the presentation.
PIRLS is a study done on primary school children; usually fourth class
aged 9 to 11 years. This information is compiled every five years by parents in
47 countries who complete a questionnaire which is then sealed and returned.
The survey consists of data from over 325,000 pupils and over 250,000 parents. What
was different about the PIRLS study? Questionnaires were used instead of
talking to parents associations. Why? Parents are very important and
governments want to get the best outputs from their education systems. When
Eemer was asked the breakdown on how the schools were picked, she explained
that a list of all Irish primary schools were sent to a company in Canada and
the company picked a portion of large schools, small schools, urban and rural
schools. This ensured that countries were not picking their best schools for
the survey.
Home-school
questionnaire:
Some of the questions asked of the
principal, teachers and staff were:
·
How often do you inform parents
on issues related to the child’s general progress and academic progress?
·
How often do you update parents
and issues related to the school and the overall academic/rules/news?
·
How often do you ask parents to
volunteer or join committees?
·
How often do you organise
parents courses or provide extra material for parents?
·
How supportive or involved are
your parents?
Some of the questions asked of parents
were:
·
Do you feel involved in the
school and informed?
·
Does the school care about your
child and provide a safe environment?
·
Does the school do a good job
helping your child with reading, maths and science?
·
What about homework?
·
What resources do you have at
home?
·
What about literacy and
numeracy activities?
The different replies from all parties are
well worth comparing.
Comparing
the various statistics from the various countries
would take a long time as the survey was done over three years. It is easier
for me to point you towards the website which will let you view your own
countries statistics in your own time on http://timss.bc.edu/
Does
any of these test scores matter?
·
Yes
·
Home resources matter
·
Literacy and numeracy matters
·
Home-school links matter as
does a safe school
·
The scores matter as we can
compare our country to other countries in the European Union. But what is most
important: children do best when schools
regularly talk to parents and where the parents feel the school is safe and
doing a good job.
We divided into discussion groups after the
presentation. Our group discussed a question asked of the principals: How do
you rate parental involvement in school activities? The word “involvement”;
some schools have parent activities like crafts classes and computer classes.
We wondered if working with the school on how well your child is developing in
the classroom would be the “involvement” the questionnaire was looking for.
Activities like parent teacher meetings when a parent may only meet with a
teacher for a few minutes to discuss the child. Members from the various
countries also discussed (1) schools and parents need to develop trust between
them and (2) families who don’t attend the school for
parent teacher meetings etc. are usually the parents the teaching staff would
most like to speak to and support in the education of the child.
Workshop and report delivered by Eemer Eivers from the Educational Research Centre
No comments:
Post a Comment