Paternalistic leadership is a leadership style commonly found in East Asia. It "combines strong discipline and authority with fatherly benevolence and moral integrity couched in a personalistic atmosphere". An article recently published in Frontiers in Psychology examined how such leadership style influences teachers in Chinese schools when situated in the educational context.  The study was conducted among 407 elementary school teachers from southern provinces in China. Participants completed a survey measuring teachers' perception of their principals' paternalistic leadership, trust in the principal, teacher commitment to students, and teachers’ job satisfaction. The result showed that: Teachers' job satisfaction was negatively affected by principals' authoritarian behaviour but was promoted by moral leadership. However, both authoritarian leadership and moral leadership had positive indirect effects on teachers' job satisfaction through enhancement of trust in the principal. Moral leadership of the principals also had a significant positive effect on teachers' commitment to students. Benevolent leadership, on the...

A meta-analysis of classroom management interventions has found that they improved academic, behavioral, and social-emotional outcomes. Published in the Review of Educational Research, the study included 54 classroom management interventions in 47 studies published between 2003 and 2013. It included some interventions that had been evaluated several times (including Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS), the Good Behavior Game, and Zippy’s Friends). About three-quarters of the studies were carried out in the U.S., with the remainder in Europe and Canada. Most interventions were focused on changing students’ behavior (85%), improving students’ social-emotional development (74%), or changing teachers’ behavior (54%). Only two interventions were specifically targeted to improving teacher–student relationships. The analysis found that: There was an overall effect size of +0.22 for the interventions, with a slightly higher effect on behavior (+0.24), and less on social-emotional (+0.21) and academic (+0.17) outcomes. There was no significant effect on motivational outcomes. The analysis also indicated that...

A small-scale study by Clayton Cook and colleagues, published in the Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, investigated the impact of a Positive Greetings at the Door (PGD) strategy. Ten language arts and math classrooms (from sixth to eighth grade) in two schools in the Pacific Northwest of the United States were identified that had low levels of academic engaged time (AET) and a high rate of disruptive and off-task behavior. In total, 203 students took part. A randomized block design was used to allocate the classes to intervention and control groups. Teachers of intervention classes were provided with training sessions and follow-up coaching on a PGD strategy (greeting the students by name, reminding students individually and collectively of behaviors for success, having a structure learning activity ready, and positively recognizing on-time behavior). Teachers in the control classes were given the same amount of time to talk with other teachers about their classroom...

A recent meta-analysis published in Psychological Science looks at how much education improves intelligence, and suggests that a year of school improves pupils’ IQ scores by between one and five points. Ritchie and his colleagues looked at three particular types of quasi-experimental studies of educational effects on intelligence: Those estimating education-intelligence associations after controlling for earlier intelligence. Those using policy changes that result in individuals staying in schools for different lengths of time. Those using school-entry age cut-offs to compare children who are similar in age but who have different levels of schooling as a result of their specific birth dates. Their meta-analysis comprised 142 effect sizes from 42 data sets involving over 600,000 participants. All three study designs showed consistent evidence that the length of time spent in school is associated with increased intelligence test scores (an average effect of +3.4 IQ points for one additional year of education). The third study design,...

A report, published by the Education Endowment Foundation and the Royal Society, has reviewed existing studies to identify interventions and teaching approaches that have a positive impact on pupil learning in science, particularly for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. The researchers from the University of Oxford analysed data in the National Pupil Database in England to measure the extent of the gap in the performance between economically disadvantaged pupils and pupils from higher socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds on national science tests. This analysis confirmed that disadvantaged pupils (pupils who have been entitled to free school meals at least once in the last six years) had much lower scores and made poorer progress in science, at every stage of their school career, than pupils from higher SES backgrounds. The gap, they suggest, first becomes apparent at Key Stage 1 (ages 5–7) and only gets wider throughout primary and secondary school. The gap for...