The District Superintendent and School Improvement: A Western Australian Perspective

ABSTRACT

The contribution district superintendents can make to school effectiveness and improvement is a neglected area of research in Australia. Research in the US suggests four ways in which superintendents impact on school improvement: the evaluation of principals and auditing of schools; the matching of school and district goals; the provision of informal support for principals; and the appointment and positioning of principals. Within an Australian setting of devolution to school‐based management, evaluation assumes major importance at school level and at district superintendent level in the pursuit of school effectiveness and improvement. An evaluation of the performance of two superintendents in Western Australia took place in 1990. It focused on superintendent performance within one key accountability area, the provision of principals’ professional development. The evaluation procedures and results are described and analysed, and implications are drawn for improving district superintendent evaluation as a means of enhancing school effectiveness and improvement.     

Primary teachers’ self‐perceptions concerning implementation of the National Curriculum for science in the UK

This paper reports on selected aspects of data, with special reference to science, derived from a survey of primary school teachers as part of the Leverhulme Primary Project at the University of Exeter.

A national sample of teachers (N = 901) across 152 schools was surveyed in order to ascertain teachers’ perceptions of competence and needs with respect to the new National Curriculum in the UK. Initially, data were collected in relation to ten subject areas and generic teaching skills, with provision made for free‐form responses concerning National Curriculum implementation.

Selected aspects of these data, principally related to the National Curriculum core area of science, were subjected to detailed further analysis and are reported. Variables identified from the survey findings, and of concern to science educators, included early subject specialism, years of teaching and gender. These were probed for relationships and significance. The tension between competing National Curriculum requirements for specialist subject knowledge and generalist teaching skills was explored.

Findings have implications for innovation in approaches to staff development to cater for perceived needs, teacher educators and curriculum alignment.     

An Australian Looks at the ICEF

A few years ago Dr. Lefranc, in a stimulating survey of the impact of picture materials on modern education, used the pungent metaphor that audio-visual specialists had possibly achieved a scratching of the carapace of the pedagogical tortoise. Many centuries ago the sacred tortoise of Chinese mythology emerged from the devastating floods of the Yellow River to teach the people there the arts of levee building, to control the annual tragedy of the waters and hence to survive to live in harmony with their fertile farmlands. Perchance a link does exist between the teaching and the tortoise.     

Application of Adjunct Auto-Instruction to Teaching Computer Programming

An N of 105 fifth and sixth grade Ss was randomly assigned to one of three groups: high level questioning (HQ), low level questioning (LQ), or control (C). Instructionally, the geographical themes for HQ and LQ were identical. However, in implementing instruction, higher (than recall) questions were predominately employed in the HQ and low level questions prevailed for LQ. Observers monitored the number and nature of the student responses to the questions. Analyses of variance indicated that HQ and LQ outperformed C Ss in terms of low as well as high level achievement for both post- and retention test situations (p < .01). The results, when compared to a previous study by the investigator, indicate the instructional importance of considering not only the level of questions posed but also the level of student involvement with those questions, as reflected in the response patterns.