IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nsr/niesrd/111.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

School-readiness, whole-class teaching and pupils' mathematical attainments

Author

Abstract

Lower schooling attainments by summer-born children have long been of concern in England: the issue is considered in this paper as part of the general problem of teaching, in the same class, children who are at widely differing stages of their development (or of widely differing abilities). Comparisons are made of the age-distributionsÑand educational consequencesÑof the Continental practice of deferring entry to primary school by a year for children who are slow- developers, with the English practice of school-entry tied to a strict twelve-months' period of birth. From samples of classes of pupils aged 9Ð10 examined here, it seems that slow-developing pupils in Switzerland, who have been placed in a class a year behind their normal age-range, perform close to the average of the class in which they have been placed; and that the dispersion of pupils' mathematical attainments in Swiss classes is much reduced, to about only half that in English classes. Where the variability of pupils' attainments has been reduced to that extent, it is likely that less individualisation of teaching is required, and that learning by the class as a whole can proceed more successfully and more rapidly. Greater flexibility in age of school-entry than currently practiced in England may thus be a pre-condition for the extension of whole-class teaching, and for more efficient teaching and learning.

Suggested Citation

  • Sig Prais, 1997. "School-readiness, whole-class teaching and pupils' mathematical attainments," National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) Discussion Papers 111, National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
  • Handle: RePEc:nsr:niesrd:111
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nsr:niesrd:111. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Library & Information Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/niesruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.