Co-ordination Within Schools, Commitment of Teachers and Students and Student Achievement

Abstract

This research study investigates co-ordination strategies within schools, their relationships to both teacher and student commitment to school, and the relationship between student commitment and student achievement in Switzerland. Two different kinds of coordination strategies, structural and cultural, can be distinguished. Structural co-ordination strategies have to do with formal, lasting arrangements that allow an organisation to operate. These include roles, rules, procedures, and authority relations. Cultural co-ordination strategies are related to the nature of communications and the consensus on organisational goals in the school. Cultural mechanisms shape what teachers want to do. Drawn from TIMSS, the sample for the present analyses included principals, teachers and students in 178 classes at the lower secondary level in three Swiss cantons: Bale-Country, Berne and Zurich. Multiple regression analyses carried out with different indicators of teacher and student commitment to school showed that school coordination strategies can make a difference, although the effects were rather small. A further analysis that included student commitment indicators as predictors of mathematics achievement suggests that the affective/social and the cognitive domains are relatively independent at class level.

Commitment to the Teaching Profession

“…It is to state that commitment is one of the overwhelming characteristics of the educators who have left an unforgottable impact upon their learners. According to Huber (1999), such educators will have strong bonds with the school, learners and their profession. Such a commitment contains passion, enthusiasm, motivation and dedication to the job and tasks to be performed and the outputs of this dedication will be automatically visible in the academic successes of the learners.…”