Teachers’ beliefs related to secondary school completion: associations with socio-educational advantage and school level

Abstract

This research used the responses of 187 Tasmanian teachers to a questionnaire comprising 52-Likert-type items, two multiple choice items, and two open-response items to investigate differences in teachers' beliefs about aspects of schooling related to students' secondary school completion. Exploratory factor analysis of responses to the Likert-type items identified 3 factors underpinning Teachers' responses. These were: 1) Student and parent aspirations, 2) Teacher and school quality and support, and 3) Expectations for continuing education. Two-way ANOVAs showed that primary school teachers scored higher on average than secondary teachers for Student and parent aspirations, and there was an interaction between level of schooling and Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) for this factor. Descriptive statistics were used to compare responses to the multiple choice items of teachers at different levels of ICSEA and schooling. Open response items were categorised in two ways: 1) as related to Pastoral, Academic, or Engagement matters, and 2) as negative or positive in relation to each of students, parents, and teachers. The results highlighted less academic and more pastorally focussed cultures in Year 7-10 schools compared with Year 11-12 schools and relatively low expectations for university study across the levels of schooling. The findings implicate teachers' beliefs about students and their families as crucial to influencing educational aspirations and attainment.

Responding to the Demands of the STEM Education Agenda: The Experiences of Primary and Secondary Teachers from Rural, Regional and Remote Australia

“…The solutions to almost all of these issues were perceived as being within the purview of the school principal and school leadership (Halsey, 2018). This is contrary to other research that found that teachers tended to locate the source of students' problems outside of the influence of the school -a tendency that Beswick et al (2019) connected with teachers' lack of efficacy in relation to effecting change. The fact that the teachers in this study located responsibility for the issues they perceived within the school, albeit with the leadership rather than with themselves as teachers, provides some reason for optimism.…”

How Permeable Are the Beliefs of Future Secondary School Mathematics Teachers to Pre-Service Experiences? Looking Across Their Years of Training

“…Meanwhile, the above analysis points to differences from 1 year to the next that attest of a coloring of future teachers’ initial beliefs by their experiences in teacher education and allow us to go one step further in our understanding of this relationship. Work to date talks about changing less pedagogically supportive conceptions of future teachers through TE (Liljedahl et al, 2019; Voss & Kunter, 2019) and the structural difficulty of combining traditional and constructivist conceptions without isolating them into distinct belief clusters (Beswick et al, 2019; Cross Francis, 2015). Our results nuance these conclusions by highlighting, on the one hand, the capacity of teacher education to broaden students’ vision, to make it integrative and thus to develop students’ adaptability to the educational situations they encounter on a daily basis and, on the other hand, the presence of mixed conceptions.…”

“…According to the pioneers of the field most often called upon in current research (e.g., Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Pajares, 1992), beliefs refer to psychological understandings, assumptions, or propositions felt to be true. Educational beliefs pertain specifically to the understandings, assumptions, or propositions about teaching and learning that an individual holds to be true (Beswick et al, 2019). We follow the prevailing trend within the educational science literature in considering beliefs and conceptions as synonymous constructs (Beswick et al, 2019; Liljedahl et al, 2019; Voss et al, 2013).…”

“…Educational beliefs pertain specifically to the understandings, assumptions, or propositions about teaching and learning that an individual holds to be true (Beswick et al, 2019). We follow the prevailing trend within the educational science literature in considering beliefs and conceptions as synonymous constructs (Beswick et al, 2019; Liljedahl et al, 2019; Voss et al, 2013).…”

Development and Validation of Pedagogical Beliefs About Teaching Practices Questionnaire: A Cross-Continental Study

“…According to these scholars, the first step is to review the literature on validated questionnaires in the field. Hence, several questionnaires related to teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning were examined (Beswick et al, 2019;Crosswaite & Asbury, 2019;Kurup et al, 2019;Lotter et al, 2018;O'Neal et al, 2017). Following this review, an initial version of the questionnaire appropriate for an international audience was designed (Marshall & Cox, 2008).…”