With others, against others and on your own: the learning preferences of teachers

Abstract

This paper is produced as part of the Cooperative, Competitive, and Individualized Learning in Education Project (CCILE). The CCILE Project has been funded by the Education Research and Development Committee, Canberra, and has received the full cooperation of the New South Wales Department of Education. The author gratefully acknowledges the energetic research assistance of Jennifer Barnes in the various strands of the CCILE Project and the collaboration of Ralph Straton in the early stages, as well as the data collection and analysis by Graeme Henderson and Barbara Lord in connection with this paper. Some of these data were included in a paper presented to the Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Adelaide, November, 1981. The Learning Preference Scale ‐ Teachers (LPST) has been developed to obtain the responses of teachers to the desirability of cooperative, competitive and individualized learning. A total of 619 teachers from Sydney primary and secondary schools (government and Catholic non‐government) completed the scale. Female teachers generally, and those in primary schools particularly, favour cooperative classroom‐learning procedures. Male teachers in both primary and secondary schools favour competitive learning. Humanities teachers in the secondary schools are less competitively inclined than their other secondary colleagues, especially less so than science and mathematics teachers. There are no significant differences in cooperative preferences, however. In general, teachers with greater experience do not differ in their preferences from teachers with lesser experience. The discussion of the results concentrates on the apparent impact of teachers’ learning preferences on girls in secondary school, especially in the study of mathematics. More generally, questions are raised about the appropriateness of pervasive competitiveness in schooling, with implications for policy decisions.