KEY POINTS:
Boosting teachers' salaries is more important than reducing class sizes, according to a new study into students' success in the classroom.
The major study has been based on research into 83 million students from around the world. It showed the key to effective teaching was the students' interaction with teachers and the quality of feedback on their work.
The research has been dubbed "Teaching's Holy Grail" by UK education journal, the Times Educational Supplement, the Sunday Star-Times reported yesterday.
It will have a "profound influence" on the future of schooling in New Zealand, according to National's new Education Minister, Anne Tolley.
Auckland University Professor John Hattie authored the study. He believed some of the results flew in the face of National's popular election promise to reduce class sizes.
He said extra money should instead be spent on boosting teacher salaries, and that the controversial idea of performance-related pay for teachers should be readdressed.
Dr Hattie's 15-year study was thought to be the largest-ever overview of student achievement, and was recently published as a book, entitled Visible Learning. It merged results from 50,000 previous studies and a total of 83 million students.
Dr Hattie used these studies to rank 138 aspects of schooling and found that overwhelmingly, student-teacher interaction at schools came out on top. But class size, school type, homework and a student's diet and exercise were nowhere near the top of the list.
All these things could help improve the quality of interaction in a classroom, but were not nearly as effective as strategies such as giving regular feedback and fostering trust.
Dr Hattie advised parents not to worry so much about which school their child attended, and pay more attention to the quality of individual teachers, especially their ability to give useful feedback.
And he said teachers should ask themselves how many of their students would be prepared to ask for help at school.
He said that that level of trust between students and teachers was very rare, which was why he wanted to calculate a way of paying teachers extra for excellence, rather than experience.
"It's a lot easier to throw money at smaller classes, more equipment, more funding, to worry about the curriculum, to worry about the exams.
"It's a hell of a lot harder to differentiate between good and bad teaching ... I think we need to spend a lot more on policies worrying about this," Dr Hattie said.
Ms Tolley said that although rewarding teachers for excellence was a "tricky issue" it did need to be addressed.
She wanted Dr Hattie to get involved in a cross-sector discussion, to be held this year, about how to solve the teacher "crisis", where rewarding teacher excellence would also be covered.
Kate Gainsford, head of the secondary teachers' union, said teachers were already using many interactive methods. But she said some classes had more than 30 students, despite what schools' teacher-student ratios claim.
She added the best way to improve interaction between students and teachers was through smaller classes.
"This is not rocket science. We know that relationships between students and teachers are very important. And we know how those relationships can be supported, and how they can be eroded."
She stressed that teachers needed to be backed up by resources, policies and training. But Ms Gainsford said it would be "extraordinarily problematic ... on so many fronts" to work out an excellence-based pay scheme for teachers.
- NZPA
