Abstract
‘Out-of-field’ refers to teachers teaching subjects for which they do not hold a subject-specific qualification. Theory and empirical evidence suggest it can adversely affect teachers’ work and students’ learning. Teacher shortages and aspects of school organisational practice have been explanations linked to out-of-field teaching. We draw on Australian PISA 2015 data to examine the extent to which these, together with teacher characteristics and other school context factors, influence the assignment of teachers to out-of-field mathematics teaching. While the results show that schools’ experiences of teacher shortages were unrelated to out-of-field mathematics teaching assignment, greater school autonomy, which captures aspects of school organisational practice, reduced the likelihood of out-of-field assignment. The results show other school context variables implicated in the relationship between school autonomy and out-of-field teaching are school sector and students’ parents’ educational level. Particular teacher characteristics also associated with their risk of assignment to teach mathematics out-of-field. Implications for policy are advanced.
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18 February 2022
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Notes
- 1.
Pedagogical content knowledge goes beyond the knowledge content per se to include the dimension of subject knowledge content that is most germane for teaching.
- 2.
The Act defined this term to mean that teachers hold a bachelor’s degree and state certification, and demonstrate content knowledge in the subjects they teach.
- 3.
Out-of-field teaching has variously been measured in terms of the proportions of students, teachers or classes that are affected by the phenomenon. The choice of the measure depends on the data available, meaning that one has to be careful when comparing results from different studies (Ingersoll, 2019).
- 4.
Out-of-field teaching rate was measured as the percentage of mathematics and science teachers teaching out-of-field in the school.
- 5.
The 2012 study included data for 21 out of 24 countries that participated in TALIS; the 2014 study included data for only 15 countries. Both studies modelled fixed effects for countries in analyses.
- 6.
The full technical details of the survey, including the sampling method, are in OECD (2017). Weights to account for the sampling design and non-response in the teacher survey are unavailable. However, student weights are available from the student survey. We use these to approximate teacher weights. We do this by assuming the same weight for each teacher in groups defined by state, sector and location of school. The sum of student weights in each group is divided equally among all teachers in the group.
- 7.
- 8.
Approximate weights as explained in footnote 5 are used in the calculations.
- 9.
Analyses showed that none of the practices for which the local or the national education authority had considerable responsibility had a significant independent effect on out-of-field teaching.
- 10.
Some families enrol their children in government schools, but these tend to be highly selective and well-resourced.
- 11.
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Acknowledgements
This study is part of the Australian science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) pathways study (ASPS), a programme of research funded by the Australian Research Council and the Department of Education and Training (DET), Queensland, through the Linkage Projects grant LP160100094, 2017–2019.
Richardson holds an Honorary Professorship at The University of Sydney; Watt holds an Adjunct Professorship at Monash University.
CRediT author statement: Chandra Shah: Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing-original draft, Writing-review and editing. Paul W. Richardson: Conceptualisation, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Writing-review and editing. Helen M. G. Watt: Conceptualisation, Funding acquisition, Writing-review and editing. Suzanne Rice: Funding acquisition.
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Shah, C., Richardson, P.W., Watt, H.M.G., Rice, S. (2022). ‘Out-of-Field’ Teaching in Mathematics: Australian Evidence from PISA 2015. In: Hobbs, L., Porsch, R. (eds) Out-of-Field Teaching Across Teaching Disciplines and Contexts. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9328-1_4
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