•  On Jan, 06, 2018
•  Mary Keating
•   Blog

Principals’ Effect on Learning

Principals’ Effect on Learning is the subject of ongoing research. Most research so far has been done overseas. Now some important research is carried out in Australia. A link to Australian research: Elite Principals in Schools, Post

Good and bad news about a mum and dad’s bank balance:  Put bluntly, the better off one’s parents the better one’s results would be in school. Since 1966, important research has been carried out. We have known or believed that the socio-economic status of parents (SES) was the most significant influence on educational outcomes for students. Read on, you have a surprise in store.

Education itself, school communities and society are more complex and varied today than was the case in 1966. Good and bad news about what sort of teacher your child had —The better the teacher, the better the student learning, and the better the results. That means we have learned, since that era, that the quality of teaching in classrooms was an important influence on student success. No surprise there!

What we have learned this century about principals:  More recently, research tells us that school principals can make the same improvements in student results as a high quality class teacher. So the results for every student made by that one person in the school affects the general results for the whole school.

Research in British Colombia, Canada : Primary schools (elementary schools) in British Colombia in Canada have the closest correlation with primary schools in Victoria, Australia, for the purpose of comparison of results. Using scores for achievement gains in BC Canada, Dhuey and Smith (2014) found that a one standard deviation improvement in the quality of principals was related to a 0.29 to 0.41 standard deviation improvement in maths and reading scores in Grades 3 to 5 students.