The 3 Dimensions of Improving Student Performance: Finding the Right Solutions to the Right Problems

Citation

Packer, C. (2012), "The 3 Dimensions of Improving Student Performance: Finding the Right Solutions to the Right Problems", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 50 No. 2, pp. 243-245. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578231211210576

American classrooms are changing; they are no longer homogeneous groups of children with the same needs and expectations for learning. In his book, The 3 Dimensions of Improving Student Performance: Finding the Right Solutions to the Right Problems, Robert Rueda explores three different dimensions of improving student performance – the learning and knowledge dimension, the motivational dimension, and the organizational dimension – in an attempt to provide a framework from which practitioners can begin to close the achievement gaps that exist in public schools. The text begins with an in‐depth analysis of where schools ought to strive to be academically, then devotes one chapter to each of the three dimensions and concludes with how practitioners can take into account different processes in their efforts to improve education through real‐world applications and gap analyses.

Chapter One provides research from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to reveal that achievement gaps between White and Hispanic students and White and Black students have not improved since 1992; these same achievement gaps can be seen in the poverty level of students as well. The chapter provides a brief summary of several approaches that have been developed in an attempt to improve educational outcomes in impoverished schools and in schools where there is a high percentage of English Learners (EL) and minority students including: Increased Accountability, Professionalism of Teachers, Standardization of Curriculum, Financial Incentives, and School Restructuring Reform. Rueda discusses the ultimate goals of schooling: students being able to perform in a self‐regulated fashion, being engaged, and developing expertise.

The second chapter describes the three goals of school in greater detail using scholarly researchers' findings to define the goals. “Self‐regulation” is defined as a student being able to plan and adapt to direct their learning. “Experts” are defined as those who notice meaningful patterns in their discipline, have varying needs of flexibility, and are able to retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little effort. Finally, an “engaged student” is one who is immersed and involved in an activity, and according to Rueda, when these three goals are met, a student will be successful.

The next three chapters describe the three dimensions on which practitioners should focus in order to decrease the learning gaps presently found in education. All are formatted in the same manner with thought‐provoking questions being posed to the reader and then research is cited to describe the dimensions in detail.

Chapter Three focuses on the learning and knowledge dimension, and Reueda describes the importance of why educational leaders should make it clear to those they supervize what students should know. A review of Bloom's Taxonomy and Anderson and Krathwohl's (2001) work bring to light several types of knowledge: Factual, Conceptual, Procedural, and Metacognitive. After establishing the importance of knowledge and assessment, Rueda moves on to the Instructional Dimension. An informative table is used to provide the reader with a toolkit of instructional methods based on different approaches to learning and each is given an exhaustive list of activities to use to deepen these approaches for teachers.

The next chapter, Chapter Four, explores the Motivational Dimension. The chapter begins with a brief overview of motivational variables which include self‐efficacy and competence beliefs, attributions and control beliefs, values, goals, and goal orientations. Self‐efficacy is described as being influenced by the prior knowledge one has related to the activity being completed, the feedback one has received, and the past successes or failures in relation to the learning. This applies to educational leaders because it reaffirms how critical the motivational factor is to instruction. Attributions and control beliefs surround what a student feels about the importance of an assignment. Rueda writes of the importance of connecting what students are learning to the importance of why they should be focusing on mastery of the subject. The concept of value revolves around a student's belief in the importance of why he or she should do the task while goals involve what they want to achieve. Finally, goal orientations are those which surround the different ways of approaching a learning situation for individual students. In order to close the achievement gap between the diverse student populations, Rueda believes all of these need to be deliberately addressed by practitioners in their leadership.

The Organizational Dimension is the focus of Chapter Five and expounds upon the leadership's responsibility to bring about changes in past practices. Poor leaders are not wholly to blame for the achievement gaps according to Rueda; instead, organizational gaps have developed over time due to organizational culture and structure. “Within a school or organizational setting, cultural models help shape the ways that an organization is structured, including the values, practices, policies, reward structures, and so forth” (Rueda, 2011, p. 55). A focus of this chapter is the work by Gallimore and Goldenberg (2001) and their research on cultural setting and its impact on the learning environment. Three sections of this chapter are dedicated to organizational gaps in English Learner referrals to special education and the principal as instructional leader. A final discussion in this chapter covers an examination of cultural models and settings in the K‐12 environment and how to target solutions to the close the performance gaps that exist.

Chapter Six explores “Gap Analysis,” a model used by researchers in the University of Southern California's Urban School Leadership Program. The first step in the gap‐analysis process is to define goals, and these goals should be determined at three levels: long term, intermediate, and day‐to‐day. These goals provide direction to schools seeking to improve the gaps existing between the varying levels of students within a school. Rueda next explains how to determine the gaps and the steps with hypothesizing about possible causes. (This is described through the example of a dissertation that used the gap analysis to improve the depressed achievement of Latino students as compared to other subgroups within the districts.) After determining the gaps, the researcher validates and prioritizes the causes. Next, solutions are developed and implemented to bring about change, they are evaluated using four levels of evaluation: Level 1 – Motivation for change, Level 2 – Impact of the change, Level 3 – Transfer of the knowledge, and Level 4 – Bottom line results of the overall implementation.

The final chapter is devoted to explaining the processes outlined in the previous chapters are not mechanical ones in which the process is followed in a “lock‐step” fashion. Schools, as Rueda notes, are organizations in which variables affect the process for improvement. The example of special education and overrepresentation is used to explain the complexities surrounding the improvement process of Response to Intervention. The text concludes with the efforts to follow the typical day of a Latino student in Los Angeles during the English Only movement in California. These students face daily challenges too significant to be slotted conveniently into a “one‐size‐fits‐all” improvement process. Instead, it is critical that practitioners follow the three dimension of improving student performance to determine what is creating the gaps in achievement.

This text is best suited for university professors teaching school improvement processes and upper‐level school administrators investigating a means to improve student performance in a diverse district. The process of change is detailed in individual chapters and each dimension can be attributed to the improvement of the learners; frequent references to research by various writers strengthens Rueda's premise that gap analysis is an important step in the improvement process.