Student Readiness to Learn and Teacher Effectiveness: Two Key Factors in Middle Grades Mathematics Achievement

Abstract

This study examined student readiness to learn and teacher effectiveness in order to determine their impact on middle grades mathematics achievement. Survey data were collected from 964 middle grades students and 93 mathematics teachers in Texas. This study is the first to use this particular collective efficacy short form with middle grade students, and factor analyses were conducted accordingly. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to measure the relationship between teacher perceptions of student readiness to learn and student perceptions of teacher effectiveness on mathematics achievement in the middle grades. The results of these analyses indicated that students' perceptions of teacher effectiveness and teachers' perceptions of student readiness to learn each made a significant contribution to the variance in middle grades mathematics achievement. Implications are discussed.

Students' Readiness to Learn in the A Five-Day School Policy in the Public Senior High School of Yogyakarta

“…The improvement of students' learning readiness that leads to their motivation and confidence (Dangol & Milan, 2019;Kearney & Garfield, 2019) can increase their learning outcome. Conversely, less readiness can decrease the success of classroom activities.…”

Reducing the Achievement Gap: Middle Grades Mathematics Performance and Improvement

“…Further guiding our decision to focus on this age range is the notion that the middle grades are particularly important in helping students develop mathematical understanding and attitudes (Parke, 2002). Therefore, if a school is able to reduce gaps across these middle gradesat a time when gaps tend to be growingit must be doing something right to help its students, whether that be through encouraging specific teacher qualities relating to understanding, questioning, and representing (Caparo, Caparo, Carter, & Harbaugh, 2010), or promoting student readiness to learn (Kearney & Garfield, 2019).…”

A Systematic Review of Teacher Factors and Mathematics Achievement

“…A total of 4 out of 40 studies focus on teacher effectiveness to cope mathematics achievement. The first study from Kearney and Garfield (2019) identifies the effectiveness of teachers from the point of view of students. Item for measuring teacher effectiveness in this study were teachers reach the highest levels of student difficulty, teachers' self-confidence in motivating their students, teachers will give up when students don't want to learn, teachers have no teaching skills, teachers believe that every student can learn and teachers lack the skills to handle discipline problems.…”

“…The second study from Asadullah (2019) examine teacher effectiveness used value-added model. Cowan and Goldhaber (2015) Although these studies measure teachers' competence in different ways, it is found that 3 of 4 studies found significant relation with mathematics achievement (Kearney & Garfield 2019;Cowan and Goldhaber 2015;Dimosthenous et al 2019). Except Asadullah (2019) argues that weaknesses in measurement method.…”

“…According to Goldhaber et al (2019), teacher effectiveness has been found to be the most important school resource related with students achievement in particular students' mathematic achievement (Asadullah 2019). Previous researchers have linked teacher factors with various dimension such as teacher quality (Darling-Hammond 2015;Goe 2007), teacher effectiveness (Campbell et al 2012;Kearney & Garfield 2019), teaching practices (Aslam & Kingdon 2011;Blazar 2015), teacher experience (Fung et al 2017;Hanushek & Rivkin 2006), teacher characteristics (Armstrong 2015;Toropova et al 2019), teacher qualifications (Buddin & Zamarro 2009;Lydia & Joash 2015) and teacher knowledge (Hill et al 2005;Tengku Zawawi et al 2009). However, knowledge of the dominating factors of teachers has been very limited in recent five years of research especially in mathematics achievement.…”