Analyzing the multiple relationships between teachers’ effective teaching skills and students’ academic achievement in computational courses

The aim of this research was to investigate the relationship between teachers’ effective teaching skills and the students’ academic achievement in computational courses according to a process-product approach. Here, the correlation between processes (teaching skills of teachers) and products (the performance of students in final provincial examinations) were calculated. For this purpose, the teachers’ teaching skills was measured using a researcher-made questionnaire. The questionnaire was designed according to the curriculum and the dominant teaching method in computational courses in Iran’ secondary education. The teachers as research sample were selected using a cluster sampling method. The number of the collected questionnaires was 175 and the reliability of the questionnaire was estimated around 0.92 according to the Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient. At next stage, the lists of students’ final scores for each teacher were provided. At the initial analyses, it became clear that the teaching skills are interwoven with the teachers’ gender. It was also revealed that a considerable part (around 40 percent) of variance of students’ academic achievement could be explained by the variable of school type. The final analysis showed that female teachers’ attention to components such as flexibility in teaching, tendency toward mastery of students, clarity in presenting the lessons, supporting student learning, self-empowerment and utilization of others’ perspectives, diversity in teaching, giving assignments, and supervising and controlling homework are significantly related with their students’ academic achievement. On the contrary, the scores of male teachers’ students who persuade students to the pre-study of the lessons, who do multiple checking of students’ learning, and tend to do more evaluations and quizzes were significantly better, compared with the scores of female teachers’ students with inclination to these skills. It seems that the different way of the use of the effective teaching methods by male and female teachers, has different consequences on the students’ academic achievement