The AERA 2019

Toronto was the place where the AERA took place this year. From 5 to 9 April we were there for presentations and for to meet partners of the ICA meeting with the international partners. ICALT3/Differentiation colleagues of 4 other countries participated, namely Pakistan, South Korea, Australia, and Hong Kong. We exchanged information about the state-of-the-art of the projects and discussed future plans for continuing the collaboration and other related themes. We did three presentations in the conference: a structured poster presentation, a roundtable presentation, and a paper presentation.

The study presented on the poster investigated the extent to which the ICALT observation measure can be compared across countries by using IRT approaches.

The study had 3 research questions, namely:

Is there evidence to support that effective teaching behavior can be measured uniformly across different national contexts?
If yes, to what extent is the comparison of teaching behavior across various national contexts justifiable?
What does teaching behavior across various national context look like?

With a partial credit model (PCM) the data of 2096 secondary education teachers of 5 countries were analyzed. The PCM model fits the 5 country data sufficiently, but only 24 out of 32 items of ICALT did not exhibit DIF and can be used to compare teaching quality across different national contexts. Visual inspection of the Wright map reveals that items are ordered systematically according to the level of complexity. South Africa and South Korea have a mean value above the average, while Hong Kong-China and Indonesia have a mean value below the average. The Netherlands has a mean value around the average. South African and South Korean teachers seem to be able to show a higher level of teaching behavior compared to Dutch and Hong Kong-China and Indonesian teachers.

The second presentation was at a roundtable session with the paper “Measuring differentiated instruction in the Netherlands and South Korea: factor structure, correlates, and complexity level”.

The roundtable was well visited (some attendees could not get a place to sit). Five studies were presented during this session.

The subject of our paper was teacher behavior and in particular differentiated instruction. This was examined using the ICALT data from The Netherlands (N=609) and South Korea (N=376) by employing multi-group confirmatory factor analysis and multi-group latent class analysis.

The study examined whether or not:

Differentiated instruction is distinguishable from other teaching behavior domains in both countries (construct specificity).
Differentiated instruction is interpreted identically in both countries (measurement invariance).
Differentiated instruction relates significantly to other domains of teaching behavior in both countries.
The relationship between differentiated instruction and other domains of teaching behavior differs in both countries (differential effect).
Typologies of teaching behavior domains are equivalent across two countries.
Differentiated instruction appears to be the most complex teaching behavior domain in both countries.

The latent factor structure of teaching behavior appeared to be the same across the two national samples. Differentiated instruction is significantly and positively related to other domains of teaching behavior and this applies to both national contexts. Compared to the Netherlands, the relationships between differentiated instruction and the other domains of teaching behavior in South Korea are considerably stronger. In both national contexts, four comparable types (classes) of teachers in terms of the patterns of their teaching behavior can be identified. These four types describe similar scoring patterns of teaching behavior, but the relative number of teachers assigned to these groups varies across both national contexts. So differential relationships between differentiated instruction and other teaching behavior domains are visible. This suggests that although the mastery of other less complex teaching behavior domains seems to be important for improving differentiated instruction skills generally, the magnitude of importance of the other domains for differentiated instruction seems to differ depending on the national context.

The third presentation was about effective and inspiring teaching in in Hong Kong and China, presented by James Ko. Ridwan chaired the paper session. The aim of this study was to characterize teaching practice patterns of inspiring teaching, and identify the relationship between effective and inspiring teaching. Compared to the vast amount of literature on teacher effectiveness, the literature on inspiring teaching is very scarce. Many characteristics of effective teachers are comparable to the characteristics of inspiring teachers. Additional characteristics of inspiring teachers are informal approaches, promoting high levels of student engagement and motivation, promote and honor student choice and input, a wide variety of activities or approaches, high levels of commitment and care for students and positive relationships with students. Some behavioral characteristics of inspiring teaching are more generic and closer to those for characterizing effective teaching, but some are more specific and uniquely different from those often associated with effective teaching. A new observation instrument that includes dimensions of teaching behaviors of both effective and inspiring teaching was developed, the Inspiring Teaching Scale .

By means of Cluster-analysis, three clusters could be identified. Except for collaboration (dependent measure), eleven variables (excluding Collaboration) can be categorized into two clusters: Cluster 1 represents Effective Teaching with eight factors: Enthusiasm, Teacher-student Relationships, Purposeful Teaching, Safe Classroom, Stimulating Learning, Positive Classroom Management, Assessment for Learning, and Professional Knowledge. Cluster 2 indicates Inspiring Teaching with factors: Reflectiveness, Innovative Teaching, and Flexibility. The findings showed that flexibility, reflectiveness, and innovative teaching form a distinctive pattern that cannot be fully explained in terms of teaching practices identified as effective teaching behaviors in previous studies. These factors seem to be a unique characteristics pertaining to inspiring teaching.