It is argued that those students who live in the metropolitan areas get a better education than those who live in remote areas. This mainly stems from the belief that those who live in remote areas do not regularly attend school because it seems like education is not something that is highly valued in comparison compared to others things. In addition, there is a lack of good educators as the remote location tends to fail to attract them.
However, an article written by the ABC highlights that ‘research shows that improved attendance at remote Indigenous schools has no impact on NAPLAN literacy and numeracy results.’ The research was conducted by the Co-operative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation studying what could be done to best meet the needs of remote communities.
“Senior research fellow Sam Osborne, from the University of South Australia, compared the data to school attendance.
"There's a common sense view that surely we can improve our outcomes by improving attendance," he said.
"You see a lot of communities and Aboriginal educators; everyone's working hard on this, because if we can improve attendance at school surely that will improve our results.
"But our research has shown there really is no relationship between improved attendance and improved outcomes with NAPLAN results over the five years.
"In contrast, non-Aboriginal kids in the Northern Territory in very remote schools are performing on par or outperforming non-Aboriginal kids in Darwin on NAPLAN, which is a bit counterintuitive because we often talk about the disadvantage of remoteness.” (Brain , 2013)
As the study has shown, there is no relationship between results and attendance which begs the question of how to measure the success? It is problematic because it wouldn’t have been easy to convince kids that education is a priority if it was taught from a young age it wasn’t. Hence, if kids attend and are locked in a classroom half the time and aren’t getting the results they need, then this should be blamed on the thing which measures this success. It should be changed, not to measure success according to facts but to define the success of a student in how much knowledge they have gained. It should be emphasised that learning is not just the key to success – it is the attainment of knowledge. If kids can see that their efforts are not put to waste, then the improvements WILL show.
Kids will not do something for nothing.
References
Brain , C. (2013, 09 20). No relationship between attendance and school performance. ABC. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-19/nrn-naplan-school-attendance/4967690
Ford (2013) states “the longer an indigenous student remains at school there is an increasing likelihood of doing worse in terms of educational achievement compare to non-indigenous students.” This may be due to the poor quality of the teaching and how the curriculum is taught leading up to student’s poor results on the test. As Ladson-Billings (2004 in Gillborn 2008, 91) has observed, “a poor quality curriculum coupled with poor quality instruction, a poorly prepared teacher, and limited resources add up to poor performance on so-called objective tests.”
ReplyDeleteReferences:
• Ford, M. (2013). Achievement gaps in Australia: what NAPLAN reveals about education inequality in Australia, Race Ethnicity and Education, 16(1), 80-102.
• Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3-12