Snapshots issue 12: Teacher job satisfaction

In November 2018, the Australian Government announced an inquiry into the status of the teaching profession that would examine ways to ensure that the profession remains fulfilling and rewarding for educators. While the inquiry’s proceedings lapsed with the calling of the federal election in April 2019, large-scale surveys do provide us with a nationally representative picture of teachers’ views of their profession. TIMSS includes questions about job satisfaction in its teacher questionnaire, and the data extracted from these can be used to shine some light onto what contributes to job satisfaction. This Snapshot examines Year 4 and Year 8 mathematics and science teachers’ job satisfaction from TIMSS 2015 data and some potential aspects of schools and teaching environments that may impact on it

National Assessment Program : civics and citizenship : Year 6 and Year 10 : technical report : 2007

This report describes the technical aspects of the National Civics and Citizenship Sample Assessment of 2007 that was conducted in Australian schools, and summarises the main activities involved in the data collection, the data collection instruments and the analysis and reporting of the data. Chapter 2 summarises the development of the assessment domain and describes the process of item development and construction of the instruments. Chapter 3 reviews the sample design and describes the sampling process. Chapter 3 also describes the weighting procedures that were implemented to derive population estimates. Chapter 4 summarises the field administration and data management procedures, including quality control and the cleaning and coding of the data. Chapter 5 describes the scaling procedures, including equating, item calibration, the creation of plausible values and the standardisation of student scores. Chapter 6 examines the process of standards-setting and creation of Proficiency Levels used to describe student achievement. Chapter 7 discusses the reporting of student results, including the procedures used to estimate sampling and measurement variance, and the calculation of the equating errors used in tests of significance for differences across cycles

TIMSS 2015 : A first look at Australia\u27s results

The goal of TIMSS is to provide comparative information about educational achievement across countries to improve teaching and learning in mathematics and science. It is designed, broadly, to align with the mathematics and science curricula in the participating education systems and countries, and focuses on assessment at Year 4 and Year 8. It also provides comparative perspectives on trends in achievement in the context of different education systems, school organisational approaches and instructional practices; and to enable this, TIMSS collects a rich array of background data from students, schools and teachers, and also collects data about the education systems themselves. This report is a first look at the results from TIMSS 2015. Focusing on the achievement results in mathematics and science at Year 4 and Year 8, this report will be followed early in 2017 by the full Australian National Report, which will examine achievement more fully and incorporate descriptive and analytical findings using the background and demographic data

Relationship between students’ economic, cultural, and social status, school climate and student achievement in Indonesia

PISA 2018 data shows that, in Indonesia, the relationship between students’ economic, cultural, and social status and their scores on reading achievement is weak. However, there is great variation between schools in average reading achievement with over 40% of the explainable variation in reading achievement being between-schools. In addition, in Indonesia, there is low social diversity across schools (students within schools are likely to be of similar economic, cultural, and social background). These conditions raise the question of whether school factors play a role – specifically whether school climate has a compensating, mediating or moderating effect on the relationship between students’ and schools’ economic, cultural, and social status and achievement. Using regression analysis, it was found that, in Indonesian schools, the composition of student body in terms of economic, cultural, and social status plays a significant role in explaining differences in reading achievement between schools. School climate was found to compensate and mediate the relationship between school economic, cultural, and social status and school reading achievement, particularly those dimensions related to classroom climate, student respect for diversity, school discrimination climate, student sense of belonging and teacher support and directed instruction practices. Only student sense of belonging was found to play moderating role in the relationship between school economic, cultural, and social status and school reading achievement, a finding that requires further investigation.https://research.acer.edu.au/ical/1001/thumbnail.jp

TIMSS 2015: Reporting Australia’s results

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is an international comparative study of student achievement directed by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). TIMSS 2015 represents the sixth such study since TIMSS was first conducted in 1995. Forty-nine education systems were tested at Year 4 level and 39 tested at Year 8 level. In Australia, TIMSS is managed by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and is jointly funded by the Australian Government and the state and territory governments. The goal of TIMSS is to provide comparative information about educational achievement across countries in order to improve teaching and learning in mathematics and science. TIMSS is designed, broadly, to align with the mathematics and science curricula used in the participating education systems and countries, and focuses on assessment at Year 4 and Year 8. A further dimension of TIMSS is its provision of comparative perspectives on trends in achievement in the contexts of different education systems, school organisational approaches and instructional practices; and in order to present this material, TIMSS collects a rich array of background data from students, schools and teachers, and also collects data about the education systems themselves. This report analyses and interprets the Australian data collected as part of the TIMSS study. Where appropriate, this report makes comparisons with the results of other countries and with the international average to better understand Australian achievement and its context

Snapshots issue 12: Teacher job satisfaction

In November 2018, the Australian Government announced an inquiry into the status of the teaching profession that would examine ways to ensure that the profession remains fulfilling and rewarding for educators. While the inquiry’s proceedings lapsed with the calling of the federal election in April 2019, large-scale surveys do provide us with a nationally representative picture of teachers’ views of their profession. TIMSS includes questions about job satisfaction in its teacher questionnaire, and the data extracted from these can be used to shine some light onto what contributes to job satisfaction. This Snapshot examines Year 4 and Year 8 mathematics and science teachers’ job satisfaction from TIMSS 2015 data and some potential aspects of schools and teaching environments that may impact on it

Snapshots issue 1: How engaged are Australian Year 4 students in their reading lessons?

In order to learn, students need to have some level of engagement in their classroom activities. The Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS 2011) investigated student engagement in reading lessons via a series of questions about students’ experiences in their reading lessons. According to PIRLS, a third of Australian Year 4 students were engaged with reading lessons, whereas more than half were only somewhat engaged and more than a tenth were not engaged

Assessing the measurement invariance of a school climate scale across the countries : implications for the construct

Thesis (M.A.E.)--University of Melbourne, Graduate School of Education, 2009School climate is now considered such an important influence on student outcomes that large scale international comparative studies such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) have included measures of school climate in their contextual questionnaires (Mullis et al., 2005). However, while there appears to be agreement that school climate is important, there are problems with much of the research into school climate which call into question the validity of many of the findings (Anderson, 1982). As most of the problems encountered are to do with conceptualisation and the use of perceptual data, this has implications for the use of school climate measures in cross-national studies like TIMSS. In particular, these problems increase the likelihood that measures of school climate will not display measurement invariance. Measurement invariance requires that groups have a similar conceptualisation of a construct (Byrne & Stewart, 2006). Lack of measurement invariance is likely to affect the interpretation of group differences on measures of that construct (Borsboom, 2006; Byrne & Stewart, 2006). The purpose of this study was to investigate the measurement invariance of the Principals' Perceptions of School Climate (PPSC) scale which was introduced into TIMSS in 2003 (Martin, Mullis, & Chrostowski, 2004). Both confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and item response theory (IRT) methods were used to assess the measurement equivalence of the PPSC across eight countries. These tests of measurement invariance found that not only was measurement invariance lacking but that the unidimensional model did not fit within the individual countries. This finding is discussed in terms of the implications for users of the PPSC and for the construct of school climate in general

Reading and engagement

In order to learn, students need to have some level of engagement in their classroom activities, including engagement in reading, as Nicole Wernert explains

Monitoring Australian Year 8 student achievement internationally : TIMSS 2011

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2011) is an international study directed by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). In Australia, TIMSS was managed by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), and funded by the Australian and state and territory governments. The goal of TIMSS is to provide comparative information about educational achievement across countries to improve teaching and learning in mathematics and science. It also provides comparative perspectives on trends in achievement in the context of different educational systems, school organisational approaches and instructional practices and to enable this, TIMSS collects a rich array of background information. This report analyses and interprets the Australian Year 8 data collected as part of the TIMSS study. Where appropriate, this report makes comparisons with the results of other countries and the international average to better understand Australian achievement and its context