Educators ready for 'next step' in 'narrowing the gap'

May 01, 2007

According to leading educationists from abroad, an Australia-wide program to "narrow the gap" between high and low achievers in Australian schools – particularly in rural and regional areas – is "poised for the next step".

Speaking at the end of the Narrowing the Gap conference at the University of New England last week, they said a national research centre based at UNE had "identified the problems", had developed innovative intervention programs for under-achieving students, and had demonstrated the effectiveness of those programs.

Professor James Royer (pictured here) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, and Professor John Hattie from the University of Auckland, NZ, said the conference had shown that the Australian researchers had moved beyond the "problems" to focus on "solutions".

The "next step" is the implementation of those proven intervention strategies on a larger-scale, longer-term basis. "Let's worry about all kids who are in those lower-achieving groups," Professor Royer said.

UNE's Professor John Pegg, Director of the research centre known as SiMERR (for National Centre of Science, ICT and Mathematics Education for Rural and Regional Australia), said that increasing the scale of intervention programs would require substantial Federal and State government funding.

Dr Lorraine Graham, SiMERR's Associate Director (Student Diversity) and the convener of the Narrowing the Gap conference, said a central conclusion of the conference had been the necessity to "address the performance of low-achieving students in a sustained and well-resourced way". She said that one of the keynote speakers – Professor Geoff Masters from the Australian Council for Educational Research – had emphasised the importance of working with individuals and small groups of students, and having the resources to do so. "The issue for low-achieving students is so complex that they really need individual or small-group support," Dr Graham said.

Another keynote speaker at the conference, UNE's Professor Ian Hay, pointed out just how cost-effective such educational interventions were in the long term, as they could prevent the development of chronic unemployment and other costly social problems in the later lives of many under-achieving students.

The international conference, hosted by SiMERR, was on April 26, 27 and 28. Delegates from SiMERR's "hubs" at universities in all Australian States and Territories attended, and there were reports of the success of SiMERR intervention programs in several rural and regional areas. "Something exciting is happening in SiMERR groups across Australia," Professor Hattie said. "They're poised for the next step."

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Professor James Royer displayed here was taken during the Narrowing the Gap conference.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at May 1, 2007 04:13 PM