Caravan effect
The caravan effect is the difference in experience and skills that children have when they start school and that is maintained over their entire school career.
Social and ethnic origins as well as language fluency and gender play a decisive role as the cause . So it is e.g. For example, it is possible that the top 5% of students in a class can do ten times more tasks than the weakest 5%. The problem from a teacher's point of view is that the performance of a student appears poor even when the individual progress of the individual increases. However, the progress of individuals or subgroups has a higher educational value than the performance level of the whole group. If they are not recognized, this has an effect on the motivation of the individual. This results in the effect that the best performers, like in a caravan, are the first to reach their school goals and the weakest, due to the persistent backlog, last.
The reading study LUST showed that elementary school children of almost all ability groups make comparable progress in performance, but that they do not have a bearing on the grading of the weaker readers because the average and good readers also get better (cf. Brügelmann 2003; 2005).
A similar picture emerged in the PISA studies for the performance development of 15-year-olds in the natural sciences and mathematics (cf. Prenzel et al. 2006). After that, low-performing versus high-performing students, migrants vs. Locals and children from different social classes each made comparable progress.
So the school does not manage to compensate for the arrears. If one observes students over a longer period of time, it is noticeable that the school even intensifies existing differences in performance in some cases ( Matthew effect ). For example, there are already differences in performance between children from educationally related families and children from educationally disadvantaged families. But these differences are nowhere near as great as the differences at the age of 15. In all countries that participated in both PISA and PIRLS / IGLU , it was found that the performance differences between children from different social classes are greater in adolescence than in childhood. This applies to the countries Germany, France, USA, Russia, Hungary, Norway, Sweden, Canada, Greece, the Czech Republic, Iceland, the Netherlands, Italy, Latvia and New Zealand.
These findings raise the question of what benchmarks should be used to measure the "performance" of students, but also schools. American studies show that the learning growth at little-known community colleges is roughly the same as at more expensive elite universities (Pascarella / Terenzini 2005). The latter achieve better results, but only because they attract freshmen with better qualifications.
See also
literature
- H. Brügelmann: The caravan effect. An interim assessment of the LUST project on learning to read . In: Neue Sammlung, Volume 45 (2005), No. 1, 49-67.
- H. Brügelmann: Basic reading skills and the “caravan effect” in primary school. Central findings from the LUST project at the University of Siegen . In: Primary School Association currently No. 84 (November 2003, 19-25).
- E. Pascarella and P. Terenzini: How college affects students (Vol. 2): A third decade of research . Jossey-Bass / Wiley: San Francisco (2005).
- M. Prenzel (Hrsg.) Et al.: PISA 2003. Investigations into the development of competences in the course of a school year . Leske + Budrich, Opladen 2006
credentials
- ↑ Schwippert, Bos, Lankes (2003): Heterogeneity and Equal Opportunities at the End of the Fourth Grade in International Comparison , p. 295. In Bos et al. (2003) First results from IGLU: Student performance at the end of the fourth grade in an international comparison . Münster: Waxmann