Looking at troublesome classroom behaviour
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Robyn Beaman, Research and Development Manager |
What do teachers find to be the most troublesome classroom behaviour, and who is the most disruptive - girls or boys?
Interaction between students and teachers
Robyn Beaman, Research and Development Manager at the Macquarie University Special Education Centre (MUSEC), recently submitted her thesis into troublesome classroom behaviour and the interactions between students and teachers in high school.
"We wanted to know what teachers thought, as well as what students thought, so one part of the research involved questionnaires," says Beaman. "Then we wanted to actually know what was going on in the classroom. So we did observations on a subset of 79 classes so we could match perceptions to the reality."
The main issues that Beaman focused on were: what teachers find difficult in terms of student behaviour; how teachers respond to students; how much time students spend doing their work; how students perceive the classroom environment; and how everything is interrelated.
The major cause of classroom disruption
"All the media attention surrounds violence and disruption in schools but when we asked teachers what they found the most challenging behaviour on a day to day basis, they said it is kids talking out of turn," explains Beaman.
'Talking out of turn' includes students' calling out in class and talking amongst themselves, but does not include verbal abuse.
"Teachers find that this high level, but relatively trivial misbehaviour, really gets them down," says Beaman. "It's the most troublesome, disruptive, and frequent behaviour they have difficulty with."
The issue of gender
What Beaman found most interesting in her research, was the information gathered in regards to gender. It has been documented in the past that boys are more problematic in school, and 90 per cent of teachers surveyed nominated a boy as the most difficult student.
"There is a lot of talk at the moment about boys underachieving at school," says Beaman. "A debate has raged about girls being invisible in the classroom and boys getting all the teacher attention. But when you look at the nature of this attention, a large swag of it is negative. I think there actually hasn't been enough focus on what exactly the environment is like for boys."
More research
With Beaman hoping to move from project management into research, and more questions being raised by her thesis, further study following on from her PhD appears likely.
"I'd like to think we'll look at the nature of the classroom environment and what we can do to improve it for both teachers and students," says Beaman. "There is also a whole area about 'what shall we do with the boys?'. I believe that we can make classrooms better places for everyone."
For further information contact Robyn Beaman at robyn.beaman@mq.edu.au or her supervisor Dr Coral Kemp at coral.kemp@mq.edu.au
Visit the MUSEC website at: www.aces.mq.edu.au/musec/