Michael O'Leary

It's the Little Things: Exploring the Importance of Commonplace Events for Early-Career Teachers' Motivation.

This paper seeks to provide a rationale for further researching the everyday events that keep teachers motivated or that discourage them. We put forward the idea that routine Affect Triggering Incidents (ATIs) are an important area for researchers to investigate in terms of how they impact teacher motivation and resilience. Two groups of participants in separate consecutive studies kept weekly diaries of incidents that made them feel good or bad about themselves in their work as teachers (Study 1) and added weekly inventories of their commitment to teaching as well as measures of self‐efficacy and self‐esteem (Study 2). An analysis of the ATIs in these diaries revealed that student engagement and student achievement are major factors in incidents triggering regular positive feelings while students’ behaviour and perceived difficulties around home influences are major factors in regular dissatisfaction. These everyday ATIs are important in the sense that they correlate significantly with measures of commitment to teaching, especially in the case of positive ATIs.

What Makes Teachers Tick? Sustaining Events in New Teachers' Lives.

To investigate what keeps teachers motivated on a day‐to‐day basis, we traced the importance of routinely encountered affective episodes. Significant research on emotions already highlights the relative importance of positive versus negative episodes, the importance of perceived origins of events and the need to differentiate between the frequency and affective intensity of episodes. Survey reports from 749 recently qualified primary teachers in Ireland strongly suggest the absence of positive experiences undermines commitment and efficacy rather than the occurrence of negative events. Furthermore, while remote structural factors may heavily influence teaching, it is the perception of events at micro‐level that impinge most strongly on motivation. Finally, the importance of particular experiences was, crucially, more related to their frequency than intensity. A major implication for teachers’ job satisfaction is the suggestion that while adverse episodes may be inevitably experienced, positive events (tha...

The Effects of Age-based and Grade-based Sampling on the Relative Standing of Countries in International Comparative Studies of Student Achievement.

The investigation reported in this article was prompted by discrepancies between the published outcomes from two international tests of science achievement: the Second International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP2) administered in 1991 and the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) administered in 1995. One finding was that while average science achievement for Irish 13 year-olds was reported to be at the low end of the distribution for the 20 participating countries in IAEP2, it was around the middle of the distribution for the 40 or so countries that participated in TIMSS in the early grades of secondary schooling. Initial comparisons suggested that there were also inconsistencies in outcomes for some of the 11 other countries that participated in both surveys, e.g. France, Portugal, and Switzerland. Analyses described in the article reveal that when sampling/population definition differences between the two surveys are accounted for, science achievement in Ireland was not at the low level suggested by initial interpretations of the IAEP2 data but was closer to the levels reported in TIMSS. While the sampling issue did not fully account for discrepancies with respect to the IAEP2/TIMSS outcomes for some countries, it is argued that the findings outlined in this article have a number of implications for policy-makers using data from future international comparative studies of student achievement.

Towards an agenda for professional development in assessment

Assessment as integral to good teaching and learning has come to be accepted as a core principle underlying curricula in many educational systems around the world. Indeed, the evidence that high quality assessment can make a big difference to pupil achievement, especially the low achievers, is mounting up (see, for example, Black & Wiliam, 1998) and provides a strong justification for those who promote assessment in schools. However, it seems that many teachers’ assessment skills (what we may call teachers’ assessment literacy) need to be improved. I will begin this paper by examining some of the international evidence for the last assertion and then proceed to outline an agenda for professional development in assessment that acknowledges the place of both classroom assessment and official assessment in supporting teaching and learning.

Supporting Primary Teachers to Teach Physical Education: Continuing the Journey.

Little attention was paid to professional development of primary teachers in Ireland to support them in teaching physical education (PE) until 2004 when specific support was provided to help them implement the revised Primary Physical Education Curriculum. A significant National In-service Physical Education Programme was undertaken involving the preparation of a cohort of tutors who were to facilitate the programme to all primary teachers. This study focuses on the findings from a study of the effectiveness of the programme from the tutors’ and teachers’ perspectives beginning with the preparation of the tutors for facilitation of the programme. Elements of good practice emerged that can inform future policy with regard to support of primary teachers teaching PE within the constraints of funding. These include (1) the importance of quality preparation of tutors acknowledging the advantage of technology that may provide a new and cost effective way of supporting them, and (2) retaining the practical exploration of content by both tutors and teachers that prompts reflection on the nature and content of programmes of PE.

Adapting science performance tasks developed in different countries for use in Irish primary schools

This article describes a four-year project undertaken to develop a set of performance tasks that could be used for assessing hands-on science in Irish primary schools. It begins by considering some of the literature on performance assessment and concludes with a discussion on the potential of the tasks to support teaching and learning in science. The main body of the article is structured to reflect the five phases of the research project itself. In phase one, science assessments used in a variety of educational systems in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States were located and catalogued. In phase two, approximately 170 performance tasks were selected and adapted by the authors to suit the requirements of the Irish primary science curriculum. In phase three, a purposive convenience sample of teachers evaluated the extent to which the tasks (a subset of 67) were suitable for use at different grade levels. The teachers’ feedback was used to amend tasks. In phase four, the researchers observed 11 different tasks being implemented in classrooms. The eleven teachers involved were interviewed about their experiences immediately afterwards. Again, based on the outcomes of this study, changes were made to the tasks. The fifth phase of the project, due to be completed in 2006, will involve the dissemination of 124 of the tasks to teachers via a booklet and a CD-ROM. Future prospects relating to other elements of the project such as Web-based resources, professional development courses and exemplars of performance are also discussed.